This question is quite reasonable. So I will try to explain to you who I am and why I decided to start this blog. You can read it or not – it’s your choice, but my choice is to contribute my professional and life experience.
Great, you are still reading! so first of all I would like to introduce myself. I’m a Ukrainian man, husband and father of two beautiful daughters. I love my family and am fond of spending my free time with them. Also I like to play guitar and outdoor sports – football and lawn tennis the most. Sometimes I like to play computer games just for fun and relaxing. Most people, who know me, can say that I’m smart, but I always answer – smart, but not enough… Therefore I call myself a lifetime learner (student). I always learn something new, I’m eager for new things and knowledge. But I’ve reached to some point where I felt willing to give my knowledge back to those who need it now or will in the future. That’s the main reason why this blog appeared.
What about my professional life? For most of my career I used to be a software engineer, but also I have plenty of experience in team management as far as mentoring and coaching juniors and trainees. And now I will try to explain why I became who I am now… Disclaimer! It’s a loooong story.
When I was a child, I was a very ordinary child from the countryside at a glance. I was like any of my friends and classmates and like millions of village boys all over the world. But, looking back over my shoulder, I see that that boy was different from others. Despite the fact that I liked to play with my friends and toys, I always learned my lessons very fast and quite easy. I was able to quickly build complex logic chains in my head. It was in my nature to learn life lessons (mine or other’s, primarily my elder brother’s) and use this knowledge in future decisions and in my logical chains.
The very first time when I saw a computer, I was 10. My mother took me and my brother to her work, when she worked on weekends. And we could play games for several hours, with interrupts, certainly. So, I very quickly understood how those programs, computers and devices work (in my primitive level), and I always told my elder brother what he had to do to start a game. In a few weeks, I started asking everyone how a computer works, and how programs and games ware created? How can I make my own, even primitive computer program? But no one could give me an answer – not parents nor teachers… I put my questions to the quiet place of my soul and continued to be an almost ordinary boy.
And one day my mother bought for my elder brother an interesting calculator. It was very different from those I had seen before. My brother was able to calculate complex things like trigonometric functions, logarithm, different powers of numbers and more… but there were some buttons he never used and didn’t know what they meant (fairly to say he even didn’t want to know, but I was interested). I took the manual. It wasn’t a thin manual as for an ordinary calculator – it was about 200 pages long. When I had read about half, I saw the magic words – “Programmable mode”… with those words my life was turned upside down. With eagerness I read page by page and learned what I was able to do with that calculator and in a few days I wrote my very first program – algorithm for solving a quadratic equation. After that I had written other programs, but there was a very small space to do big things… there were only 140 steps available for the algorithm and 16 memory cells – but it was just a start…
Another gift from fate I got when I studied in 8th form. My friend showed me an advertisement in the newspaper. It said “Lyceum of Information Technologies invites students of 8th form to an open day”. So, we decided together to visit this high school. We were both fond of mathematics and interested in computers, therefore after each new phrase that we heard our eagerness to study here grew. Unfortunately my friend failed the entrance exams, but I passed… It was hard to study there after countryside school and once I was on the edge of expulsion from Lyceum because of a very low final mark. But the teacher said that he would give me a chance and put his subject to my exams schedule. I took that chance and passed that exam with the highest mark. After that occasion I became almost an excellent student.
After all my classes I usually came to the computer classroom and did my homework, which requires a computer, because I didn’t have a computer at home. It was very expensive for my parents and I knew that… I was sitting behind the computer till Lyceum closed. After all my homework on the computer was done, I looked for ways to improve my previous works, or asked my teacher for additional tasks, or was “spying” after older students for what they did, or even tried to come up with my own idea. If someone needed me – he knew where I could be found.
After Lyceum I expectedly went to the University with the same specialization – Mathematics and Computer Science. For me nothing changed almost. It was because the Lyceum and the University department were located closely and also some teachers from Lyceum were teaching there. And, of course, I still didn’t have a computer at home, so after my classes I came to the computer classroom and did my homework and other things. Sometimes I helped service crew with computers, therefore we became friends and maybe I was an unofficial part of the team. I was allowed to do some things that were restricted for other students. In my third year of University I finally got a computer at home. My friend gave me his old computer, because his parents bought a new one. So I started to spend more time at home with the computer rather than in the classroom, but I still visited my “crew” from time to time to speak with them or if they needed my help.
Before the graduation from the University, me and my friend were invited to take an internship in one company as software developers and we agreed. So we started to visit our job after our classes. After graduation from University we both started to work as full time developers with a half year experience.
Indeed, that is the history about how I became a software developer… In my long career I faced different domains and different systems and programming languages. Mostly I worked with a domain-specific platform with an integrated programming language – 1C, within several versions. Also I worked with MS SQL, Oracle, My SQL databases, hands on php, javascript, html, css for web pages, used C++ and Pascal / Delphi for desktops. Java and Kotlin for mobile. Also worked with Microsoft Axapta and Microsoft BI and many more….
As for me today – I’m working now as an Android Developer, but it’s another long story as well…