MELNYKK

Artem Melnyk (born 2008, Kyiv) is a Ukrainian-born Canadian software developer, entrepreneur and community leader based in the Greater Toronto Area. He is the founder of Erthiox, a free interactive e-learning platform, and a student of Computer Systems Technology at Sheridan College. Trained for eleven years as a classical pianist and for six years as a visual artist, he combines engineering with leadership, event production and client-facing sales. He is a committed advocate of the principle that high-quality education should be free for everyone, and Erthiox is built around it.

Early life

Melnyk was born in Kyiv in 2008, just as smartphones and broadband internet were becoming everyday infrastructure. He grew up at home in a digital world rather than learning it later. As a young child he spent long evenings building interactive games in PowerPoint, using linked slides and buttons as a primitive game engine, well before he knew the word “programming”.

His parents supported the interest with two introductory books, one on Python and one on JavaScript. Rather than work through the exercises, he skipped to the final projects, studied real code written by professional developers, and copied it line by line to understand why each part worked. He taught himself HTML from online videos, attended a school coding club that taught Pascal, and built his first small projects: a mind map of the toys he wanted and a recreation of a website he visited daily. He also finished a fully playable game of his own.

Education in Ukraine

As a student in Kyiv, Melnyk studied at several institutions at once. He earned a place at a science lyceum while attending both a music school and an art school, and he supplemented his studies with private tutoring in several subjects and participation in academic contests and tournaments. He later moved through a second lyceum, and briefly enrolled at a law college before leaving Ukraine.

Music and art

Melnyk completed an eleven-year music program with two diplomas: a pianist’s diploma and a diploma in composition. His interest in composing grew into electronic music, where he found a point at which music and code meet: synthesizers, sound waves, digital audio workstations and signal processing. For his electronic composition module he wrote and presented an original project during a live stream that drew more than two thousand online viewers and an audience of over thirty people in the room. He later presented written scores, including arrangements for instruments he had never played, to his school’s principal as part of his graduation portfolio.

In parallel he completed six years of art school, graduating with a diploma. His final project required two large paintings and a custom frame produced by a specialist organization. He describes music and visual art as two distinct languages that engage different parts of the mind. See Craft & Passions.

Student and civic leadership

Melnyk’s public leadership began in school when he ran for class leader and won by a single vote. The role led to the school’s student administration, a cross-class body of elected students with real authority and budgets. Through it he organized events for audiences of up to five hundred people and received his first award on stage before several hundred attendees. He was later named the school’s student committee organizer for the year, a role for which the school paid him.

Student council events included a two-day leadership camp outside Kyiv, which he attended in two consecutive years. At the camp he met a fellow student leader who introduced him to Kyiv’s student-led municipal council. As a teenager of fourteen or fifteen, he attended closed meetings within governmental structures in Kyiv, represented his city on international leadership webinars hosted by the United States, and completed the U.S. Peace Corps’ Global Executive Leadership Program, which covers high-impact decision-making, organizational growth and cross-cultural collaboration. He also attended a closed conference on public relations and financial business regulation organized by the Kyiv City State Administration.

Early ventures

Melnyk’s first commercial experiments came in elementary school, where he resold items to classmates and later sold completed technical project drawings that other students were required to produce. As his event work grew, so did his income from professional output. When a small amount of cryptocurrency, worth twenty-seven US dollars, arrived in his wallet, he used it as seed capital to create his own coin and an NFT collection. It was designed as a philanthropy model in which participation, rather than passive holding, generates returns. He still owns the project and intends to develop it into a philanthropic movement.

Move to Canada

Following the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, Melnyk’s family was displaced, and he later emigrated to Canada. He restarted his education in an Ontario high school, learning a new language and academic system from the beginning. By his second year he had received certificates of achievement in both Entrepreneurship and Science, each chosen by a teacher from among all students, and was on the honour roll with marks above eighty percent across eight courses. He received the Father Phil Jones English Language Learner Award, the Minister’s Certificate of Recognition for Community Involvement (Silver Tier), and recognition as an Ontario Scholar. He graduated with an Ontario Secondary School Diploma from St. Paul Catholic Secondary School in June 2026 and began the Computer Systems Technology advanced diploma at Sheridan College that September.

Career

His first paid engagement in Canada was “How to Enter IT”, a lecture he designed, built and delivered. It ran two hours and used six websites he coded to simulate the daily workflow of different technology specialists, an interactive quiz that returned personalized industry recommendations with salary data and a starting roadmap, and a drag-and-drop website builder called GridSmith that exports clean code. In August 2025 he led a hybrid version of the workshop across the Greater Toronto Area, where every participant built and launched a first live website.

Through 2025 he sold custom websites to clients, launched a web game, published scientific articles and built a public presence on LinkedIn. He also attended events at multiple colleges and universities, visited federal government buildings, a logistics company and an automotive manufacturing plant, and built a professional network across several industries. Since June 2026 he has worked as a sales associate at Call It Spring, part of the ALDO Group, where he found a talent for sales that he had not expected, consistently meeting performance and service targets.

Erthiox

Since June 2025 Melnyk has been the founder and lead engineer of Erthiox, a premium, ultra-minimal e-learning platform that is free to use. It offers more than 5,000 interactive lessons, seven browser-based science and finance labs, over fifteen career roadmaps, a guided project studio called BBL, a career builder, a gamified progress system, an encyclopedia, expert talks and a credential verification portal that lets employers confirm certificates by ID. He owns the full product lifecycle, using real user data and performance metrics to drive features and architecture, with a strict focus on cross-device responsiveness and accessibility. Every feature is free, with no subscription tiers and no paywalls. The platform’s stated mission is that talent is spread evenly across the world while opportunity is not, and that financial status should never determine access to elite education. Melnyk regards this as the central goal of his work.

Community and philanthropy

In Canada, Melnyk has volunteered as a Summer Council Member at the Newcomer Centre of Peel, built a digital scavenger hunt platform for the Dixie Bloor Neighbourhood Centre, and served as Peer Lead at the iFun “Get Ready” event for incoming high-school students, where he designed and hosted the scavenger hunt in front of more than a hundred participants. He co-led the Archdiocese of Toronto’s Family Dinner Dance fundraiser in 2025 and 2026 and helped lead the 70th anniversary Festal Mass and community BBQ of St. Dominic’s Parish, presided over by His Eminence Frank Cardinal Leo. See Philanthropy & Volunteering.

Interests and personal life

Melnyk speaks English and Russian fluently, Ukrainian natively and French at an intermediate level. Outside work he trains regularly at the gym, composes music, draws and paints, and explores new cities and industries through live events. His stated direction is software development, event production and the creative arts, and he keeps open to opportunities he has not yet imagined.

Timeline