Yan Chernikov
Chief Technology Officer, Core Technology at Studio Cherno
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolYan Chernikov is a seasoned technology leader and builder with 12 years of hands-on experience in core systems, graphics and engine development, now serving as CTO, Core Technology at Lucky Robots from Melbourne. He founded Studio Cherno, where he teaches C++ and game-engine design while developing the Hazel engine and contributing substantial architecture and platform work to high-profile open-source projects like Dear ImGui, GLFW and Vulkan tooling. Yan’s background includes core-engine work at EA on Frostbite/Osiris, demonstrating deep expertise in performance-sensitive C++ systems, rendering pipelines and build-system engineering. He blends systems-level software architecture with practical developer tooling—adding premake build integrations, resource management, and Vulkan support across projects—to make complex graphics stacks more usable. Beyond leadership, he remains an active contributor and educator, uniquely combining public-facing technical content with production engineering chops.
13 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
St. Michaels Grammar SchoolSwinburne University of Technology
Russian, German
Github Skills (30)
vulkan10
c-language10
game-engine10
multiplatform10
game-dev10
memory-management10
cross-platform10
imgui10
c1110
im10
graphic10
c1710
window-management10
game-development10
cprogramming-language10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
TheCherno/imgui
Dec 2018 - Jun 2022
Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Immediate Mode Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:26 commits, 13 PRs, 23 pushes in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Yan primarily contributed to the Dear ImGui library, with a focus on integrating with and extending existing features. Their work includes adding support for new platforms like Vulkan with texture management, fixing bugs related to image buttons and viewports, and improving the integration with various build systems. The commits also involved updating the core imgui code to keep up with upstream changes and improvements related to features like docking.
cppgraphical-user-interfaceimguiimmediate-mode
TheCherno/Hazel
Oct 2018 - Jan 2023
Hazel Engine
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 149 commits, 49 PRs in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Yan implemented a foundational game engine utilizing C++ and OpenGL. Their work focused on setting up the core application structure, including the application entry point, core components, and event handling. They also integrated external libraries like spdlog for logging, implemented an ImGui layer for UI development and established an event system and camera components. Their contributions are significant for building the base for a functional game engine.
hazelrenderingvulkan
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