Vasili Smaliak co-founded MyNetDiary with Sergey Oreshko in December 2005. They first met in Belarus, where Sergey was an IT manager who mentored Vasili and other interns. Vasili graduated from Belarusian State University's Faculty of Radiophysics and Electronics, specializing in artificial intelligence.
Vasili and Sergey later worked together as software development consultants at RDA Corporation. Vasili then spent 10 years as an Enterprise Integration Architect at GMAC Mortgage, now part of Ally Financial, where he designed and built enterprise integration services and frameworks connecting systems used for mortgage origination and servicing.
Since MyNetDiary's founding, both Vasili and Sergey have contributed to its backend and product development, with their responsibilities evolving as the company grew. The platform's backend runs on a clustered architecture with distributed caching and has scaled to support more than 32 million registered users. This shared backend powers every version of MyNetDiary:
- the web application, launched in 2007
- the native iPhone app, released in August 2008 as one of the first calorie counters on the App Store
- the Android and iPad apps, added in 2010
- the Apple Watch and Wear OS apps
Vasili led the development of MyNetDiary's Android and web apps, cloud infrastructure, and offline food diary with multi-device synchronization. He also led the development of Food Research On-Line (FROL), the system used to continuously improve the MyNetDiary Food Database. Each food entered through FROL is validated by algorithms and approved by human reviewers before being added to the database, which is licensed to dozens of partners. Vasili built MyNetDiary's engineering team and continues to lead it.
Vasili has also led MyNetDiary's AI development, including Meal Scan, AI Coach, AI Voice Logging, AI Restaurant Menu Scan, and AI Suggest Meals.
Vasili is occasionally delighted to hear friends and neighbors praise a "cool diet app called MyNetDiary" without realizing that he helped build it. More importantly, some users — particularly people with diabetes who have lost weight and improved their health — have written in reviews, "You saved my life."
