I was born in Moscow and I lived in Israel since 1991. I have a B.A. in Linguistics and Hebrew language from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I buy plastic CDs, vinyl records and paper books and I don't plan to stop doing this any time soon. In particular, I buy a dictionary of a language that is spoken in every country that I visit.

I've been editing Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wiktionary and Wikibooks in Hebrew, English, Russian, Catalan and other languages since 2005 using the username Amire80, which I still use most of the time for personal volunteer editing.

Over the years I cared more and more about languages issues—fonts, bidirectional text, language-related templates, translation, etc. I reported many bugs about them, tested language support of new features, helped Wikipedias in new languages to start, etc. After Wikimania 2011 in Haifa, in the production of which I was involved, I was hired by the Foundation to work full-time developing language-related Wikimedia-related software.