Andrey Faridovich Mindubaev (born July 23, 1979, Nizhny Novgorod) is a Nizhny Novgorod programmer known in the city's internet community by the nickname Covex (in Russian, Kovex) [1]. He was one of the first employees of the NN.RU portal and later became its lead programmer [2]; he is the author of open-source PHP development tools, which he publishes under the name covex-nn [3][4].

NN.RU

In the history of the portal told by its founders in 2008, Mindubaev is named among the first employees who came to the office on Alekseevskaya Street. The company moved there in late 1999 and, in early 2002, relocated from there to 30 Piskunova Street. Together with the manager Olga Bykova, he was among those who stayed at NN.RU for years: by 2008, Bykova was deputy director and Mindubaev was lead programmer [2].

On the portal itself, he is registered under the nickname Covex. His personal page is number 534, created, according to the portal's note, "in 2001 or earlier," and has the status "trusted" [1].

On the Nizhny Novgorod wiki nnov.org, the page "Covex," which he also edited himself, called him one of the oldest programmers, since 2001, at NN.RU and NNOV, responsible for developing the SiteDNK and CityDNK systems [5]. SiteDNK is a website management system that the NN.RU Internet Company offered to clients as a separate service.

Home page

In the nn.ru zone, Mindubaev kept a home page, Covex.nn.ru — a mix of a personal diary and a showcase of homemade web tools, typical of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s. In 2004 the main page was titled "I am Covex," and the menu offered "My works," "My diary," "My photos," and a display of the visitor's IP address [6]. In a January 2008 snapshot, the first menu item is JooS [7] — the same name as his PHP library, later released as open source [3].

After the home page, he kept a diary at covex-nn.ya.ru; a snapshot of it from February 2011 is preserved in the web archive [8].

Open source

On GitHub, Mindubaev has been registered since August 1, 2009, under the name covex-nn; his profile lists Nizhny Novgorod and the company Apnet, and as of September 2026 he had published 75 repositories [3].

His main topics are PHP and development infrastructure. In 2013 he released the JooS library, with its JooS_Stream virtual file system, and a set of packages that make it possible to install the Moodle distance-learning system via Composer: moodle-installer, moodle-package, and a Jenkins job template for such packages. In 2017 a Symfony Flex application skeleton with docker-compose support (docker-workflow-symfony) and PHP Docker images appeared [3].

In the Packagist catalog, eighteen packages are credited to him; among them is covex-nn/moodle, published in May 2013 [4].

Sources

  1. covex.nn.ru — NN.RU — Personal Page of User Covex (archive)
  2. Interview with the founders of NN.RU — conducted by Evgeniya Orlova, June 17, 2008
  3. github.com — Profile of covex-nn (Andrey F. Mindubaev) (archive)
  4. packagist.org — Packages by covex-nn (archive)
  5. Nizhny Novgorod Encyclopedia (nnov.org) — page "Covex," version of November 5, 2011
  6. web.archive.org — Home page of covex.nn.ru, 2004 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Home page of covex.nn.ru, 2008 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — Diary at covex-nn.ya.ru, 2011 (archive)