Belarusian IT

When I ask people "What do you know about Belarus?" many know nearly nothing. Some people have heard that Belarus is a dictatorship, and imagine that it looks like a decaying socialist country. Most people, however, don't know anything about Belarus, while other even can't show Belarus on a map.

The most funny thing in that issue of Belarus being a mostly unknown country is that a lot of people actually use products made by Belarusians. I don't mean Minsk motorcycles that are still popular in Vietnam, or Belarusian-made Belarus tractors and world's largest BelAZ dump trucks which are even depicted on other states' currencies. Of course, I don't undermine the significance of these industrial products, but there is another sphere in which Belarus has gained huge but underestimated prominence.

This sphere is IT technologies. IT industry in Belarus has its roots in Soviet cybernetics - a sphere which was quite appreciated due to its significance for the military, space exploration and industry. Soviets had managed to develop a strong IT basis, which was inherited by several post-Soviet republics, mainly by Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Estonia.

It is quite a widely-known fact that Skype was created mostly by Estonians. But it is barely known that one of Skype's main competitor, Viber, was created mostly by Belarusians at two developing centers in Minsk and Brest, while one of its co-founders is Belarusian. Not many people playing a world-famous World of Tanks game realize that it was created in Belarus by Belarus-originated Wargaming.net company, which is know a transnational corporation with studios all around the world. Hardly any people in the West know that recent extremely popular MSQRD application was created in 48 hours at an IT-competition in Minsk by a then-unknown Belarusian IT company called Masquerade, which has been recently bought by Facebook with an intention to integrate MSQRD technology into Facebook social network.

These are the most famous examples. But actually there are much more of them. A lot of local Belarusian IT-companies have official registration in the United States, and freely sell their software to various American clients, among which there are huge and well-known corporations. One of the first such companies, EPAM, was created by Belarusians and settled in Minsk as well as in the US already in the beginning of 1980s. EPAM is now listed on one of the Wall Street indices.

Logos of the most well-known Belarusian-made IT projects

The problem is that most Belarusian IT-specialists, despite working in Belarus, in most cases work for foreign companies or for foreign clients. Nevertheless, Belarus is a very important IT hub. Belarusian programmers have already created something like a lobby in many worldwide IT giants, like Facebook, Google, Oracle, Apple and other residents of Silicon Valley.

Belarus has a huge potential in IT, which still remains not realized in its full scale. A lot of friends of my study programming back there, in Belarus, while I very often encounter fellow Czech and Slovak programmers and IT students in the Czech Republic. I would say, that I am very fascinated by the power of IT sphere and without any sarcasm I would like to say that programmers are among the true  current and future world rulers, silent and hard-working. I am very proud of my friends-programmers working in Belarus, I am inspired by them and I am sure that Belarus in some time will become an influential IT power, free and inspirative - the basis has already been laid down.