Alex Kapranoff was born into the family of an electronics engineer and programmer for the old Soviet "Big Iron" computers. He started programming at the age of 12 and has never worked outside the IT industry since. After earning a degree in Software Engineering with honors, he had a short stint in the world of enterprise databases and Windows. Then he settled on open source, Unix-like environments for good, first FreeBSD and then Linux, working as a developer for many Russian companies from ISPs to search engines. Most of his experience has been with e-mail and messaging systems and web security. Right now, he is trying his hand at a product and project management position in Yandex, one of the biggest search engines in the world.

He took his first look at Nginx working in Rambler side by side with the author of Nginx, Igor Sysoev, before the initial public release of the product. Since then, Nginx has been an essential tool in his kit. He doesn't launch a website—no matter how complex it is—without using Nginx.

He strongly believes in the Free Software Movement, loves Perl, plain C, LISP, cooking, and fishing, and lives with a beautiful girlfriend and an old cat in Moscow, Russia.