Buenos Aires, Argentina
Anton Minin Baranovskii
Engineer, builder of digital products, and author of Thirst for Reality
About
I have been in software development since 2016. At Yandex and Sber I built government and enterprise systems: enforcement document processing, city utility billing services, multilingual B2B platforms. I went from page layouts to designing the architecture of services used by millions of people.
Since 2025 I have been building my own products: Toqen, an authorization infrastructure; Litseller, a reading platform; and Start4Drive, an education service. In each of them I own the architecture, the product decisions, and the implementation.
My approach to problems is systematic: first separate facts from interpretations and find the real task, then look for a solution that survives contact with reality. That practice grew into my book, Thirst for Reality.
What I do
Architecture of digital products
Designing systems that survive growth, redesigns, and changing requirements.
Building and launching products
Taking a product from an idea and a first version to stable operation in production.
Complex interfaces and integrations
Multilingual services, data-heavy interfaces, integrations with external systems.
Systematic problem analysis
Finding the real task behind the first wording: facts, contradictions, resources.
Evolving existing systems
Auditing, recovering, and steadily developing projects that are already live.
Engineering at the product–user intersection
Technical decisions that serve the product and its people, not the other way around.
Book
Thirst for Reality
How to see the real task and make stronger decisions in business, product, and life.
When the task itself is wrong, effort, generic advice, and AI only take you in the wrong direction faster. The book is a practical route: separate facts from interpretations, find the contradiction, see the system, and test the solution against reality. It is built on TRIZ, systems thinking, and the experience of real products.
For people who work on hard problems: founders, engineers, product people, managers — anyone making difficult decisions.
An introduction, 12 chapters, a finale, and a practicum in every chapter.
More about the bookExperience
- 2023–2025
Yandex · Engineer
B2B service: external integrations, a localization module, architectural consistency.
- 2019–2022
Sber · Lead Engineer
Interface for processing enforcement documents: lower error rate, faster processing.
- 2018–2019
Infogorod, Moscow · Senior Engineer
City services for utility billing.
- since 2025
Own products · Founder
Toqen.app, Litseller, Start4Drive: architecture, product, and engineering.
Projects
Toqen.app
Authorization infrastructure built around access control: QR-based authorization with device-bound cryptographic verification.
Role: Founder: architecture, security model, mobile client.
Litseller
A multilingual reading platform: structured content and cross-language reading with translation.
Role: Product and engineering: platform architecture and content pipeline.
Start4Drive
Preparation for the driving theory exam in Argentina: interactive practice and a clear presentation of official materials.
Role: Product and engineering.
Writing and ideas
Essays on systems thinking, the engineering approach, digital products, and artificial intelligence.
-
The Secret Weapon Used by the Biggest Companies: What TRIZ Is and How It Helps Find Strong Solutions
How TRIZ helps Samsung, Intel, and other companies identify contradictions, improve products, and solve complex problems systematically.
-
Why Good Solutions Do Not Always Work
Sometimes a solution is perfectly logical, yet it fails because it never addresses the real problem. A look at why we solve the wrong task and how to see it more clearly.
-
Companies Have Started Moving Away from AI
On AI costs, the limits of automation, and why effective AI use is becoming the new professional standard.
-
Writing in the Age of AI: A Personal Essay
On writing, research, doubt, and conversation with artificial intelligence.
-
The Age of Trust
Why knowledge is no longer the main advantage in the AI era.
Contact
Write to me to discuss a product, an engineering problem, a consultation, or collaboration. I am also open to conversations about the book: interviews, publications, talks.