In this post I would like to say a few words about the history of our company, which is closely related to my own story, and then introduce the members of our team.

Alex aka Maniac

CEO and Founder

My name is Alex, I was born in 1979 in Ukraine (the former USSR). Since my very childhood I’ve loved computers. In the past  they were huge, quite expensive and practically unavailable for most people. My father was a programming engineer, that’s why I could spend some time at a computer. I loved playing computer games and decided to become a programmer. But when this happened, new interests appeared. For example, I discovered the internet. It was 1996, and the download speed was something like 10 bytes per second.

The Story of mp3Tag

Somewhere on the internet, the MP3 music format was born. Back in those days you could download virtually any song in this format from the Russian part of the internet. But there was a problem, as many filenames were like song01.mp3. If you had hundreds of such files, it was very difficult to find the needed song. So, in 2000, still studying at university, I developed for myself a simple program that could edit ID3 tags. My friends liked it, then friends of the friends, and so on. This is how the first program of ManiacTools, mp3Tag, was created. The first sale was on October 14, 2002. I started developing other multimedia programs. In 2004 I quit my main job and started working for myself, hiring other people.

Why ManiacTools?

Some people wonder why our company is called ManiacTools, which sounds a bit strange. I was keen on computers and the internet, and it looked pretty much like a mania. So I got this nickname, Maniac. As for ManiacTools, our software solves different problems, just like usual hammers, screwdrivers etc. There are also many “maniacs” around, they are wild about music and movies. It’s them who we develop our programs for.

Apart from software, I love cars. Currently I own a Subaru Outback and an Infiniti FX. The last has “Maniac” as its license plate :).

Now a few words about every member of our team.

Our Team

Victor is our leading developer. He keeps an eye on bug reports and feature requests and does a lot of programming. Victor also does some research as to what programming technologies and techniques would be the best for this or that feature.

Igor writes various texts that a good program needs to have and supports users that have any questions about our software. He also does alpha and beta testing, finding and reporting bugs in the process of software development. In his spare time he loves travelling, watching football, playing board games, and reading English literature.

Vlad does mostly programming, but also writes manuals and articles for our software, manages marketing and technical support. He is also a science fiction author, has written several books, two of them published. Loves music, plays guitar and piano.

Arkadeey is our server administrator. His main task is to keep our sites up and running, protected against any threats. If you see that our site is down, you know who is to blame :).

Of course, many other people participated in developing programs for ManiacTools. Besides the programming itself, you need to create icons, write some texts, post notices on download archives, translate everything into different languages (all ManiacTools programs are multilingual), and much more. So, there are lots of professionals that worked for ManiacTools or continue to do so without being full-time members of our team.