I was born in Brest city (Republic of Belarus) on 15 June 1982.  My
father Dzimitry Miasnikou (9 September 1952 - 19 August 1991) was
industrial worker.  My mother Sofia Miasnikova (born 28 May 1945) is a
nurse in the Central City Hospital of Brest.

   Till 8th grade I was in School #23 of Brest.  Then I went to Lyceum
#1 of Brest.  While there, I joined the "Intellectual games club"
where I began to play in a sports version of "What? Where? When?"  I
regularly participated in the tournaments until a couple of years ago
with my best result being 9th place on "24hr Open Intellectual
Marathon" held in Dzerzhinsk in 2009.

   Since the early 8th grade I was interested in computers.  So when I
graduated from the lyceum I went to Brest State Technical University
on speciality "Automated Systems of Information Processing".

   I finished the University in 2005, moved to Minsk, Belarus and
started working as a Software Engineer.  During my career I worked on
projects on a scale from firmware to highly scalable distributed
systems, like 3G telecom system IMS, working on which I spent six
month in Gurgaon, India in Flextronics Software Systems (now Aricent
Group).

   Since my first "What? Where? When?" game in 8th grade I aspired to
increasingly challenging problems finding them most interesting.
That's why this spring I applied to a job at Google.  Google is
well-known for handling hard-to-solve or "impossible" cases.  To my
surprise and great delight I was accepted.