About

My name is Farhod Pulatov. I'm a developer, technical lead and entrepreneur from Tajikistan. I've been working in IT since 2007.

Over these years I've grown from a technical-support engineer and programmer into a head of development, a digital-product architect and an entrepreneur.

I've always been interested not just in writing code, but in building complete systems that solve real business problems and are used by real people.

The beginning

My professional career started in 2007 as a technical-support engineer at the internet provider Istera. I configured network equipment, ADSL modems, Wi-Fi routers and point-to-point wireless links.

Later I moved into banking, working as a specialist in the automation department at Tojiksodirotbank. It was during this period that my main interest shifted decisively toward software development.

Fintech and the first large systems

From 2010 I took part in building the products of EMON. One of the key projects was Emon Wallet — an e-wallet I started working on back in 2010. Later I helped create and grow the Emon payment system, the dealer portal, web services and payment applications.

Besides fintech, I worked on ehost — a hosting-management system integrated with ISPConfig.

This period gave me a lot of hands-on experience with payment systems, backend services, web and mobile applications, and integrating different information systems.

Telecom and Babilon-Mobile

In 2015 I joined Babilon-Mobile as a software engineer in the automation department. I built internal REST APIs, integrations with CRM and telecom systems, USSD and SMS services, and automation for managing subscriber services.

Working in telecom taught me how to build systems that serve large numbers of users and are tightly integrated with an operator's existing infrastructure.

In 2019 I became head of the development department. In that role the job was no longer only programming, but also managing the team, architecture and growing digital products. One of the main directions was building a digital ecosystem for Babilon-Mobile subscribers.

I took part in designing the e-wallet and personal account, microservice architecture, databases, banking integrations, CRM integrations, merchant infrastructure, analytics tools and the mobile app.

This stage changed my approach to development a lot: I began to look at a system as a whole — from infrastructure and architecture to user experience and the product's business model.

SOR PIZZA and entrepreneurship

Alongside my career, I've always been drawn to building my own products. One of them is SOR PIZZA — a food-delivery service in Dushanbe that we built as a technology business.

Here I got to apply an engineering approach directly to my own company. We built our own CRM, an order-processing system, courier apps, telephony integration, analytics tools and automation for operational processes.

SOR PIZZA became an important experience for me at the intersection of IT and a real operational business. When you build your own business, it isn't enough to write a technically correct system. It has to cut costs, speed up processes, help employees and, ultimately, deliver a measurable result.

From developer to product builder

Over the years my tech stack has changed many times. I started with servers, network equipment, PHP, Java, C# and classic web applications. Then came REST APIs, mobile development, high-load backend systems, microservice architecture, containerization and modern infrastructure.

But today the specific programming language is secondary for me. A far more interesting question is: how do you turn an idea into a working digital product?

To do that you have to think at once about architecture, development, infrastructure, data, UX, security, the project's economics and its business processes.

Artificial intelligence

In recent years a significant part of my technical experiments has been about AI and machine learning. I'm especially interested in:

• Large Language Models (LLM) — applying and training language models;
• Speech-to-Text — speech recognition and working with Whisper;
• the Tajik language in AI — adapting modern models for languages with far less training data;
• AI automation — using models inside existing business processes;
• AI agents — building systems that can carry out sequences of actions on their own and interact with other services.

For me AI is interesting first of all not as a standalone technology, but as a new tool for building software products.

What interests me today

My professional interests currently sit at the intersection of several areas:

• Software engineering and system architecture;
• Artificial Intelligence and LLMs;
• Speech-to-Text and speech processing;
• Fintech;
• E-commerce and marketplaces;
• Telecom;
• logistics and last-mile delivery;
• business automation;
• mobile applications;
• infrastructure and DevOps;
• geoinformation and navigation systems.

I'm especially drawn to projects where you have to combine several technologies and build a complete system from scratch.

Why this blog

Over the years I've accumulated a lot of hands-on experience, experiments, good decisions and mistakes. So I want to use this blog first of all as an engineering journal. It will hold notes on development, architecture, infrastructure, AI, my own projects and the problems that come up when building real systems.

I don't want to write only about how a technology is supposed to work in theory. I'm far more interested in how it works in practice: what worked, what didn't, why a particular architectural decision was made, and what I'd do differently today.

In the end, these are the tasks I enjoy most: taking an idea, understanding the domain, and turning it into a working product.