Hi, my name is Jiutuo Sun.
I’m a Chinese expat living and working in Moscow.
Timo is my personal website.
About me
I’m a lawyer practicing corporate/M&A law in Moscow. When not busy lawyering, I’m very passionate about tech, front-end development, typography and design in general.
I still remember that hot summer day in 1997, I was 6 and still in China, my parents brought home our first computer, what feeling of wonder and joy it was to power it on, hold the mouse, hear the Windows 95 startup sound (followed by a blue screen of death). I wanted to learn more, dig deeper into the technology, and thankfully my parents were supportive, so I started learning graphic and web design programmes (such as CoralDraw, DreamWeaver, Flash, Fireworks, 3D Studio Max) by the age of 10.
On my 12th birthday, I moved to Moscow with my parents. Living and studying in a foreign country, not knowing the language, was quite stressful, and my computer was my haven, my small corner of peace. In parallel with studying Russian, I began programming on Visual Basic and appreciated the logical thinking and attention to details so needed for a programmer.
My professional career went a different way. After my high school graduation in 2008, I was admitted to the Law School of Moscow State University, so everything tech related became my hobby. But hey, I can do both.
History of Timo
Back in 2000, when internet meant 56k modem, dial-up sounds and minutes of waiting just to download a picture, there weren’t many websites (not in Chinese at least). During summer holidays in 2001, I went to a computer school and learnt some popular professional programmes for graphic and web design. I found Microsoft FrontPage very intuitive and easy to use, and my first scratch website was made using that programme. That website was never published though.
In April 2006, I was in 9th grade, a mid-level graduation level in Russia. So in an attempt to do anything but exam preparation, I began working on the first real draft using FrontPage 2003 and had it published via Yandex.Narod free hosting on 22 April 2006, and the website was named “TimoSvanuckov” (yep, I know…). That did’t last long — I removed it two days later and replaced it with another design, followed by another one, and so on.
Flash websites have already become extremely popular by the end of 2007, so I followed that trend. So in my usual procrastinating nature, rather than preparing for middle school graduation exams, I spent five months spanning from December 2007 to April 2008 creating the sixth version of the website on Flash. 20 April 2008, the website was published via by.ru free hosting.
In 2014, after more than two years of halt, I turned to WordPress and brought back the website with a fresh re-design. What came next are a couple more resets on the design, with me further advancing in the technology.
I guess I lost count on the number of redesigns this website underwent. At some point, I need to start focusing more on the content — we’ll see when that happens.