Hello! 👋

My name is Yaroslav Golubev, I am a research administrator and a data analyst at JetBrains Research, led by Dr. Timofey Bryksin. I also enjoy philosophy, linguistics, history, Chinese language and culture, and writing poetry. Feel free to drop me a line! ✍️

Background & Education 🖼️

Born and raised in Saint Petersburg, Russia. ⚓

In 2018, I obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Physics 👨‍🔬 from ITMO University, with a major in laser technologies, and planned to become a researcher. While there, I worked as a lab assistant, a guide in the educational museum of optics, as well as a secretary in the International Students office, and participated in the THE BRICS & Emerging Economies Universities Summit as a representative of Russian students. Every summer, I also worked as a camp counselor. 🏕️

In 2020, I obtained a Master’s degree with honors in Laser Technologies ⚡ from the same university, with a major in biological and medical applications. During the first year, I worked as an engineer in the lab and a scientific interviewer at the university’s news portal, and also led the School of Laser Technologies for highschoolers. While studying there, I was lucky to join JetBrains and fell in love with data science. 📊

In 2025, I obtained a Bachelor’s degree with honors in Philosophy 💭 from Herzen University, focusing on irrational and religious teachings, Eastern, and especially Chinese philosophy. During this time, I studied the Chinese language and served as an administrator in research centers dedicated to Eastern culture, esotericism, and mysticism. In 2022, I moved to the lovely Belgrade, Serbia, and thus finished my education remotely. 🏰

Since 2025, I am getting a Master’s degree in Religious Studies 🛐 from the Russian Christian Academy for Humanities, with a major in studying mystical and esoteric teachings. I also became a member of the Association for the Study of Esotericism and Mysticism and started fully managing the association’s YouTube channel. I still help out with organizing seminars and scientific conferences there, promoting the academic studies of non-academic topics. 🔮

Research 🔬

Software Engineering & AI

While I used to carry out research of my own, I realized that I enjoy helping other people more, and became a research administrator, with the goal of supporting other researchers, both administratively and academically. 🤝 Nowadays, I mostly assist in different stages of projects, from planning to writing. Throughout the years, this enabled me to touch on all kinds of subjects, including serverless computing, embeddings of code, Jupyter notebooks, code completion, code quality, computer science education, psychology of programming, and others. It is a great privilege to learn more about these areas from my colleagues. I also still do academic work like reviewing papers and organizing workshops, as well as occasionally giving classes. 🎓

The overarching theme of my own studies in software engineering was mining large corpora of existing source code and analyzing them to discover various patterns, as well as better understand how developers write software. While I was lucky to participate in a number of practical collaborations, my personal interest always leaned closer to the analytical and the descriptive side of things. Specific topics of my research are:

code clones, 🐑
open-source software licenses, 📝
code changes (patterns and automatic fixes), ️✨
refactorings, 🛠️
code and test smells, 👃
evolution of software ecosystems, 🌱
AI assistants. 🦾

Laser Technologies

Before my work in software engineering, I used to do research in the field of laser physics. 💥 While I did not get far, my studies related to laser-matter interaction, specifically, laser irradiation with ultra-short (femtosecond) pulses. With a major in laser technologies in biological and medical applications, my last studies were dedicated to combatting viruses, as well as creating colloidal solutions of nanoparticles with antibacterial properties. 🧫

Humanities

Humanities are an important part of my life that takes place in parallel to my main job. 🏺 My research in this regard exists mostly as part of my education. In my philosophical degree, I studied Taoism a lot, especially Zhuangzi, and conducted research about the concept of relativity in ancient Taoist texts. Now, as part of my religious studies, I am starting to explore esoteric movements within Russian emigration in Yugoslavia a hundred years ago. 🪬

Google Scholar says I have 664 citations and an h-index of 14. Cool! (I wrote this auto-scraper, I am very proud of it, and I want to use it to the fullest!) 🤓

Hobbies 🎨

All my main hobbies are humanities — which is why I try to study them for as long as I can. I like writing poetry, drawing on my favourite literature, namely, Russian classics of the second half of the 19th century. 📜 I also love philosophy and care especially deeply about Eastern philosophy — Chinese (Taoism, Chan Buddhism) and Indian (Śramaṇa/Nāstika traditions: Buddhism, Jainism, Ājīvika), — as well as various religious movements all over the world. 📿 Another major love of mine is the Chinese language. In addition to learning it, I love analyzing its content, popularity, history, and evolution — and care about linguistics in general. 💬 Finally, more recently I fell in love with history, especially from the 7th century (Tang dynasty in China, the emergence of Islam, start of true Middle Ages) to ≈1929 (Great Depression, collectivization, start of peak authoritarianism), mostly Chinese, Russian, and that of Central Asia. ️🪶 A more narrow period from ≈1860s to the end of the First World War is my main inspiration and passion in everything — history, poetry, prose, paintings, classical music, and overall aesthetics. 🏛️

P. S. While I am not an avid traveler, I did write down all the places where I have been. There aren’t too many of them, but luckily, the number can only go up! 🧳