The Cherno

Yan Chernikov (born: )https://www.instagram.com/p/B55IfOpDon7/, better known as The Cherno, is an Australian Youtuber and former at . His content mainly revolves around , , video game engines (including Hazel Engine), and software engineering. He is best known for being the original creator of the Hazel engine, a general-purposed 3D game engine, of which he frequently talks about on his channel.
==Etymology==
The channel name "The Cherno" is derived from Chernikov's surname. According to Chernikov, it was because his classmates at school started using it as a nickname, and it got stuckhttps://www.reddit.com/r/thecherno/comments/114mob/welcome/.
==Early Life and Education==
Chernikov was born on December 10th, 1994. His surname and the fact that he can speak Russianhttps://au.linkedin.com/in/yan-chernikov suggests that he might have a Russian heritage.
Chernikov went to St. Michaels Grammar School since he was 10 years oldhttps://au.linkedin.com/in/yan-chernikov, suggesting that he might've moved from a different location. At St. Michaels, he was a tennis player and was the "media captain"https://au.linkedin.com/in/yan-chernikov. After graduating high school in 2012, he went to Swinburne University of Technologyhttps://au.linkedin.com/in/yan-chernikov, where he studied for four years before graduating. During this time, he was the Co-Founder and leader of a game development club and was the programming helpdesk.
==Software Engineering Career==
Chernikov obtained the position of a software engineer at Electronic Arts in 2014. He quit in 2019 due to work on his Youtube channel and Hazel full time.
==Youtube Career==
Chernikov posted his first Youtube video on Feburary 28th, 2012, as part of a thirty-four-videos series on creating a 3D game in the Java programming languagehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlrATfBNZ98dBKl_szQhHbcpVZ9vYFA8F. The video was rather popular, receiving over eleven thousand views within the first three monthshttps://web.archive.org/web/20120520080050/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH1xpfOBN6M.
Shortly after the thirty-third video of the Java game development series, Chernikov hosted his first livestream on June 15th, 2012. He hosted a second live-stream the next day, in which Chernikov answered questions that fans ask him during the stream.
On August 2nd, 2012, Chernikov started another series called Morning Coffee, in which he talks about the Java programming language in general. The series is only seven videos long.
Chernikov participated in Ludum Dare 24, in which he submitted a game called Genesis, which he made in forty-eight hours. He later posted a video on Youtube which is essentially a breakdown of the gamehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hJG8zcOcPM. In 2022, the page in which games submitted to Ludum Dare 24 can be downloaded from went offline, but Genesis, along with many other games submitted to Ludum Dare 24, can still be downloaded by using the Wayback Machine.
After Ludum Dare 24, Chernikov started a Minecraft series called The Cherno's Adventures in Minecraft, in which he plays Minecraft hardcore during his study breaks. The series ended after he was killed by an Endermen while mininghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8DvXiMT1wc.
After the second last episode of The Cherno's Adventures in Minecraft, Chernikov started another Java game development series, this time just called Game programming. In this series, Chernikov guides the viewer through the process of creating a video game with the Java programming language, but without using any third-party libraries.
Around the first half of 2015, Chernikov started developing a game engine called Sparky, in which he made a tutorial series around. It is around this time in which he began moving away from Java and towards C++. The project eventually stopped receiving attention after some time, in which Chernikov started paying more attentions to a new C++ series.
In 2017, Chernikov started a C++ programming series, in which he talks about the C++ programming language in general, covering it's features and libraries. It is currently the longest running series on the channel, with the last video dating to February 11th, 2022. 
Around 2018, Chernikov began a tutorial series that guides the viewer through the process of developing a video game engine in C++. The engine, called Hazel, eventually split into two branches, Hazel and Hazel 2D, with Hazel being the engine that Chernikov develops during on his own and is only accessible to Patrons, and Hazel 2D being the engine he develops in the tutorial series.
On October 2, 2020, Chernikov started another series, known as Code Review, where his fans can email him their code projects and he makes comments, suggestions, and feedbacks in the videos. 
==Contents==
In his early days as a Youtuber, Chernikov mainly posted contents related to game development and the Java programming language. However, he eventually started shifting over from Java to C++. By the time Chernikov finished university, he was no longer posting anything related to Java.
===C++===
The C++ series is the longest running series on the channel that is still active today, with around a hundred videos as of March 2022. The series mainly focuses on the C++ programming language, with the first few videos covering the basics of C++, such as setting up development environment and writing the first "Hello World" program. The series eventually gets more advanced later on. Currently, Chernikov's C++ series covers a majority of the topics and features within the C++ programming language.
===Game Engine===
The best known series of videos is probably the ones about the development of game engines. Originally called the game engine series, the original intent of the series was to create a tutorial about building a video game engine (named "Hazel") from start to finish. Around the start, he also has a "development branch" of Hazel in the series, which is a special branch of the game engine that acts a reference point for where the tutorial is heading towards. The development branch is only accessible to Patrons, but development logs of the development branch is available for anyone to view.
However, eventually, Chernikov decided to make the development branch of Hazel the "primary" version of Hazel, and the version shown in the tutorial series is renamed to "Hazel 2D", which is essentially Hazel but with only 2D support. The main reason behind this decision is that building a 3D renderer is hard, and that it will take a long time, which will produce a lot of videos, and that not a lot of people are going to sit through that much videos to learn how to build a game engine. He also stated that learning how to build a 3D renderer in the context of Hazel is not the best way to learn how to build a 3D renderer, and that he will be creating a dedicated 3D rendering tutorial that is not tied to the Hazel codebase.
===OpenGL===
The OpenGL is a basic series that guides the viewer through the process of writing a GPU-accelerated rendering application with the OpenGL API. The series begins by showing the viewer how to set up a basic window to render to, and how to copy data from the system memory to the video memory. He then shows the user the process of setting up shaders, uniforms, textures, and more advanced OpenGL topics.
The OpenGL series is mainly focused on the OpenGL API itself rather than on graphics programming in general. As a result, he does not go very far into implementing any graphics programming techniques (bloom, shadow mapping, etc) beyond basic perspective projections and 2D batch rendering.
===Code Review===
In the Code Review series, fans sends Chernikov their projects and Chernikov records a video in which he looks through their projects and gives them comments, feedbacks, and suggestions. The first few videos of the series are usually under 30 minutes long, though eventually as the series advances, the videos has gotten longer as Chernikov looks more carefully into the code that was sent to him.
To send Chernikov a project to review, fans emails chernoreview@gmail.com and gives a little bit of background information about them and the project, and whether they prefer Chernikov to keep them anonymous or not.
===Reactions===
Chernikov occasionally reacts to video game trailers, game engine trailers, video game console showcases, and other related topic videos to give comments about the new technologies. 
===Podcasts===
The Cherno Podcasts, the name of the podcasts made by Chernikov, is a series of podcasts that discusses topics related to programming, game engine development, software engineering, and etc. There is currently only two episodes, with the last one posted on September 2021.
==Personal Life==
Chernikov is married since around mid-April 2019. 
On January 13th, 2022, his first daughter, Elizabeth Chernikov, is bornhttps://www.instagram.com/p/CY87b6Rvm7Q/
==References==
Category:Tech YouTubers
Category:Australian YouTubers
Category:Users who joined in 2012