Under the Lid: How AtomicJar is Reshaping Testcontainers

**Sergei Egorov** (0:00)
A few weeks ago, I realized that my last commit was from the very beginning of September.
And it's so weird because, I mean, I'm a developer, like I want to write code, I'm enjoying writing code. But I realized that, okay, I'm also enjoying running the company now. It's a big surprise. I would never think that I would spend a week without writing code. And here I am just months without spending enough time implementing features.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:26)
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**Dan Lines** (0:46)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Sergei Egorov, the co-founder and CEO of AtomicJar.
Sergei, thanks so much for joining us and congrats on the $4 million seed round funding earlier this year.

**Sergei Egorov** (1:04)
Thank you, Dan. It's indeed a great opportunity for us to turn what we've been doing as developers into something bigger.
And yeah, I'm excited about this opportunity also to talk to folks like you. So thanks for inviting me.

**Dan Lines** (1:17)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I wanna start by giving our audience the opportunity to get to know you a little bit better before we dig into AtomicJar.
I see from your background, your LinkedIn profile that you're a Java champion. At what age did you start learning Java? And then like, how did you become to be a Java champion?

**Sergei Egorov** (1:38)
So I've been doing Java development for I think around 10 years. And it wasn't my first language, definitely not. I started with a bit of PHP, a bit of Pascal and stuff like that. I was all seen to game development for seven years. And it was like, my first geeks were actually a game development project.
And yeah, it was fun.
You always have this yesterday deadline, but at least it's fun. And then I turned into Java developer. And eventually, since I was doing conferences, some community efforts, developer advocacy for Testcontainers project and other projects got the recognition as a Java champion, which is title you receive rather for what you did versus for what you're currently doing. But on the other hand, it's a nice thing to have as a recognition of your efforts because most of these efforts were on your own capacity and not like you're paid for it or something like that.

**Dan Lines** (2:33)
Do you have to get nominated? Or how does it work to get to be a Java champion? What's the process?

**Sergei Egorov** (2:40)
Java Championship is a nomination only program. You have to be nominated by another Java champion and then the vote and then it's as simple as receiving two minus ones to get denominated. But luckily, I guess I don't have enemies or anything like that. Yeah, I got past the nomination.

**Dan Lines** (3:01)
That's really cool. You mentioned you, I think some of your first gigs, you said you were a game developer. That's the type of job that I remember when I was doing development. Everyone wanted to be a game developer, a video game developer.
What type of games were you working on?

**Sergei Egorov** (3:16)
Mostly social network games or online games, but some casual ones, something simple. And I've been doing a lot of Adobe Flash development with ActionScript and FLEX and everything.
And I don't know, I still miss Adobe Flash, to be honest.

**Dan Lines** (3:32)
Yeah, that's funny. My second job out of college, university, I was doing ActionScript and FLEX. I remember I was messing around with, I think it was called PaperVision back then, which is like a 3D. And I was working at a startup company, Aprago, which that was the name of the company. It became CloudLock. We then changed the name and it became very successful. But there was probably only like 10 of us at the company at the time, maybe less.
I was a junior developer. And our CEO, Gil, like I was doing the front-end development, I brought in PaperVision and we were making a data, we were doing security software. And I was building the dashboard for the security officer to look at.
And I did it with PaperVision. So like the panels would fly in and it was in 3D.
And I remember showing it to him. He was like, oh, this is awesome. Like, how the hell did you do this? I'm like, I don't know. I just found this thing, PaperVision. It's really cool.