It started with a dropped frame — 59 instead of 60. Most wouldn’t notice. Alexander Korostin did.
In real-time rendering, every 16.67 milliseconds matters. That single missed interval shattered the illusion of continuous motion. To Alexander, it wasn’t just a technical hiccup — it was a breach in narrative, a fault line in immersion. From that moment on, he didn’t see glitches as errors. He saw them as signals. Indicators that something, somewhere, had failed to keep up.
That sensitivity to disruption, to hidden friction, shaped his career. He wasn’t driven by aesthetics or metrics. He was chasing integrity. Flow. The seamless synchrony of parts under pressure. What began as a fixation on visual fidelity matured into a broader philosophy: engineer systems that remain coherent, even when stressed.
“I wasn’t chasing numbers. I was chasing flow.”
That pursuit took him from the microsecond-critical world of graphics engines to the unpredictable domain of freight logistics. From debugging shaders at 2 a.m. to orchestrating global shipping routes amid fuel price spikes and geopolitical noise. The tools changed. The demands grew. But the core remained: build systems that endure complexity without collapsing under it.
Engineering as Dialogue
Alexander’s trial by fire came at a scrappy game dev startup. No funding or fallbacks. Just a handful of engineers, elbow-deep in memory management, real-time rendering, and pipeline optimization. They weren’t building atop mature engines — they were building one.
The workload was grueling. But what stood out wasn’t the technical lift. It was the loop.
Their players weren’t consumers. They were collaborators. One night, a user shared a custom frame-pacing benchmark. Alexander rewrote engine code overnight to integrate it. By morning, the player had already posted feedback — not just bug reports, but celebration.
“That was the first time I really understood that code could be a conversation.”
Engineering, he realized, wasn’t a monologue. It was iterative, responsive, and communal. Systems weren't static. They evolved through exposure, feedback, and stress. He stopped designing for “completion” and started designing for adaptability. When Unity and Unreal later swallowed the indie engine market, he didn’t cling to old code. He let it go.
The Web as a Simulation
By 2012, the web was transforming. Node.js was emerging — asynchronous, event-driven, and lightweight. Alexander recognized it wasn’t just a programming shift, but a mental model.
The web, like a game engine, was becoming reactive. Responsive. Stateful. He transitioned seamlessly. Not as a defection from graphics, but as an expansion of his operating model. He freelanced across verticals — e-commerce, logistics, streaming interfaces — writing both front-end and back-end code. But the underlying question stayed constant:
“Where’s the friction?”
Latency. Jank. Structural drag. Alexander hunted these down. He wasn’t chasing “snappy” UX. He was designing out waste. Building systems that didn’t just respond, but anticipated. Predictive caching. Graceful degradation. Redundant failover. He saw each request, each click, as a data packet with context, and built infrastructure that treated it that way.
Debugging at 3 A.M.: The Theater Years
In 2016, Alexander joined Krisberg, a company building Theater Management Systems — TMS platforms that orchestrate projection, lighting, audio, HVAC, and display systems across multiplex cinemas.
On paper, it was automation. In practice, it was diplomacy with chaos.
Theaters were full of aging, incompatible hardware. Devices that spoke in half-documented protocols. Systems that required malformed packets or precise hex payloads to function. Integration meant reverse-engineering behaviors, reading serial traffic byte by byte, and simulating packet loss just to test recovery.
Testing happened at night, 2 to 4 a.m., because live environments couldn’t be disturbed.
“You learn to read hex dumps like a novel. You look for patterns in the noise.”
Alexander built middleware to normalize device behavior. Used Raspberry Pis as protocol shims. Deployed watchdog processes to catch silent failures. Eventually, theaters that required live operators began running on scheduled automation. Manual interventions dropped by 90%. Projectionists transitioned from operators to strategists.
Maritime Logistics: Intelligence at Sea
In 2022, Alexander joined Shipnext, a Belgian firm applying AI to maritime logistics — one of the most complex, least digitized industries on Earth.
Here, Alexander saw echoes of his earlier work. Maritime logistics resembled game engines — just messier. Events weren’t polygon updates. They were weather changes, port delays, tariff updates, and human errors. And instead of rendering pixels, the system had to move millions of dollars in steel, grain, or oil — efficiently, legally, sustainably.
“Shipping logistics is like a game engine, but messier. Fuel prices, weather, port traffic, regulations — all in motion.”
At Shipnext, Alexander leads system architecture for platforms that predict and act. His projects include:
- Optimization Algorithms: Reducing emissions by up to 2% per route by factoring in port congestion, vessel behavior, and weather.
- NLP Pipelines: Transforming unstructured email requests into structured, machine-readable freight orders — reducing human parsing effort by 70%.
- Resilient Infrastructure: Deploying fault-tolerant systems that remain functional even on weak maritime satellite networks.
Designing for Strain
Alexander doesn’t start with best-case scenarios. He starts with constraints — bandwidth, volatility, edge failure. He builds systems around the assumption that things will go wrong. And when they do, they shouldn’t fall apart. They should bend.
“You don’t impose order on a system. You listen to it.”
That ethos runs through all his work. In freight, in theaters, in browsers. He doesn’t chase brittle perfection. He designs for quiet degradation and fast recovery. A good system doesn’t hide its failure. It handles it.
Theory Meets Practice
Alexander holds a Master’s in Software Engineering. Long before formal education, he was building 3D engines from scratch — crafting lighting algorithms, tuning shaders, and pushing rendering performance.
That combination — theoretical fluency and practical urgency — defines him. At Shipnext, he reads academic papers not to publish, but to extract and apply.
As Principal Software Engineer, he:
- Leads architecture for high-reliability logistics systems.
- Mentors engineers across disciplines, from AI to embedded.
- Interfaces between academic research and production deployments.
- Prioritizes results that ship, not prototypes that stall.
He’s also working on a book — not a memoir, but a survival guide for engineers designing under constraints: bandwidth, latency, failure, ambiguity.
Systems That Endure
Alexander doesn’t think AI is overhyped. He thinks attention is misallocated.
“The most important systems aren’t flashy. They don’t trend. They endure.”
He builds software not to impress, but to persist. Systems that outlast founders. Systems that operate through crisis. Where AI doesn’t replace people — it frees them from the brittle, the tedious, the fragile.
The goal isn’t intelligence for its own sake. It’s durability under pressure. Elegance under strain. Flow under fire.
