Petr Makhnev πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’»

Software Engineer | TON Core | ex JetBrains, ex VK

About

Software engineer building developer tools and infrastructure, with a background in compilers, static analysis, and IDE development. My work spans language implementations, cross-platform libraries, and complete development environments. Currently building the TON developer ecosystem at TON Core; previously worked on PhpStorm at JetBrains and compiler tooling at VK.

Experience

TON

Software Engineer Jul 2025 – Present

TON Core | Yerevan, Armenia Β· Remote

When I joined TON Core, smart contract development relied on a fragmented set of tools. I led the effort to rebuild and unify the developer ecosystem around Acton, covering language tooling, IDE integrations, testing, debugging, deployment, and local infrastructure.

  • Created Acton β€” the primary toolchain for developing smart contracts on TON
  • Created Localton β€” a runtime for running real TON networks locally with validators, a liteserver, TON Center v2/v3 APIs, and indexers
  • Created Wallet Engine β€” a cross-platform Rust engine for TON wallet applications, with support for Swift, Kotlin, and TypeScript/WebAssembly
  • Created Acton Studio β€” a local web workspace for running tests, inspecting smart contracts, and managing TON development environments
  • Created actonscan β€” a TON explorer for developers with source code debugging, message deserialization, emulation, a testnet faucet, and developer tools
  • Created a testnet faucet with proof-of-work challenges, abuse prevention, and persistent payout jobs
  • Created TON extension for VS Code and language server with support for Tolk, FunC, Fift assembly, TL-B, and the Acton toolchain
  • Created a complete Tolk analysis pipeline in Acton
  • Led IntelliJ TON 4.0 release with Acton support
  • Led IntelliJ TON 3.0 release with more than 170 tasks
  • Created Tolk formatter
  • Added proof-of-concept Fift assembly compiler on top of the TASM for the future Tolk backend
  • Created TVM Instructions catalog
  • Added coverage and profiling for tests in Blueprint
Middle Compiler Engineer Jan 2025 – Jul 2025 Β· 7 mos

TON Studio | Yerevan, Armenia Β· Remote

When I joined, Tact was still a prototype with limited tooling and significant reliability issues. Over six months, I built a language server and integrations for VS Code and JetBrains IDEs, created a formatter, fixed over 100 bugs, and implemented more than 40 features.

Support and development of Tact programming language compiler and tooling:

TON-related:

Moved to the TON Core team to develop tooling and infrastructure for the whole TON ecosystem.

Spawn Programming Language

Core Developer Jul 2023 – Oct 2024 Β· 1 yr 4 mos

Yerevan, Armenia Β· Remote

  • Developed a compiler (transpiler to C) and an interpreter from scratch, implementing 250 inspections
  • Developed plugins for VS Code and JetBrains IDE
  • Developed Language Servers and Tree-Sitter grammar for it
  • Authored a complete language specification
  • Wrote nearly 70,000 lines of code in the Spawn standard library
  • Developed tools such as spawnfmt, spawnprof, and spawncov in Spawn itself

JetBrains

Software Developer Oct 2022 – Mar 2024 Β· 1 yr 6 mos

Yerevan, Armenia Β· Remote

Support and development of PhpStorm IDE:

  • Improved type inference system for better generics support
  • Implemented various bug fixes and improvements in type inference
  • Added a bunch of new inspections and quick fixes
  • Improved documentation support
  • Added better support for Psalm types
  • Improved Laravel Blade support
  • Improved testing support
  • Closed about 100 tasks

V Kontakte LLC (VK.com)

Compiler Engineer Jan 2022 – Sep 2022 Β· 9 mos

Saint Petersburg, Russia

Created an internal AdmStorm plugin for PhpStorm used by our developers, and supported its ongoing development by implementing new features:

  • Checking the synchronization of the local repository and the repository on the development server
  • Additional actions for push and pull, taking into account hooks on the development server
  • Various configurations for launching KPHP, PHPUnit and PHPLinter
  • Built-in KPHP Playground and Hastebin
  • Ability to view the generated C++ code for the entire site
Junior Compiler Engineer Sep 2020 – Dec 2021 Β· 1 yr 4 mos

Development of the KPHP compiler from PHP to C++:

  • Participated in the development of a new functions color concept for architecture validation
  • Built NoColor on top of NoVerify for architecture validation in PHP projects outside of KPHP, with GitHub Actions, tests, and a PhpStorm plugin
  • Implemented the concept of color in KPHP and added support for various PHP functions
  • Implementing PHP 7.4 and PHP 8 features

Development and support of the NoVerify static analyzer for PHP:

  • Added over 50 new checks to NoVerify and internal linter
  • Added support for Composer and improved testing systems
  • Rewritten the entire CLI to be more user-friendly
  • Implemented full PHP 8 and PHP 8.1 support into the parser
  • Created NoVerify Playground and improved type inference system
  • Wrote new documentation and many small improvements

Building a PhpStats connection analyzer for PHP from scratch:

  • Collect 9 different code metrics and build 8 different dependency graphs
  • Collect dependencies between classes and functions and check reachability
  • Collect general statistics on the project and view info in sortable tables
Trainee Software Engineer Jul 2020 – Aug 2020 Β· 2 mos

Internship

  • Development of static analyzer NoVerify for PHP and internal VK linter
  • Adding new checks and code refactoring
  • Writing unit tests

Education

Baltic State Technical University "VOENMEH" named after D.F. Ustinov 2018–2022

Bachelor's Degree, Information Technology