Curriculum Vitae in prose
I am a software engineer. While I began my dabbling from DOS (and CP/M clone SCP) and Q(uick)BASIC (and Vilnius Basic) back in 1995, pretty soon I was writing simple applications in Visual Basic, getting familiar with Win32 API. When I found out that it was possible to connect two windows computers via parallel port, I began playing with winsock sockets. One thing led to another and in 2002 I was a freshly-baked linux console cowboy trying to prevent LAN users from eating up all our 512Kbps bandwidth with Kazaa - with deep packet inspection, iptables (with mangling module) and CBQ scheduling. While it was fun, it ultimately didn't pay, so I got a "real" job. After an encounter with rather menial first official job titled "customer service representative" I was, for a brief time, promoted, so to say, to a "business support team" member. It didn't last (it began and came to an end in 2005), but it provided me with crucial paradigm shift - I began developing server-side applications, first in ASP and MSSQL, then became acquainted with PHP & PostgreSQL. Eventually (in 2007) I got a job that fit my PHP skills, taught me HTML, JavaScript and CSS. It was there that I created my own general-purpose CMS, which, after small modifications would become a package tracking system, company "intranet" service, mass-mailing system et cetera.
Sadly, it did not last forever (until 2011), and I left for somewhat greener (and much larger) pastures. Said greener pastures came at a cost of dramatic paradigm shift - like a prodigal son I returned to Microsoft-based environment and I spent some three years working with ASP (Classic), ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC and .NET in general (C# became my language of choice in this environment), all on Windows servers running IIS6 to 8 and MSSQL databases.
Even though my work required me to use proprietary software, in my free time I still coded in PHP (at least twice a week), maintained my personal servers (running Debian), and wrote bash scripts for fun. My phone was mostly (80%) open source. I found it refreshing and necessary to maintain this balance between these two opposing philosophies to benefit from both.
Then, an opportunity presented itself - to work with technology I've grown nostalgic of, to re-enter the world of open source and check how the world of PHP has changed since the last time I've professionally laid hands upon it.
Everything seemed quite wonderful, and by the end of 2014 I've started working in a greatly nourishing environment, caught up with the new-ish environment quickly, and started feeling "at home".
Now, when I'm back in the free world again, C# has become a hobby; strictly-Microsoft environment - a memory, and it felt good.
As I'm approaching a ripe age, I am now focusing on enabling others to do great stuff - either by being in a leadership position, or just consulting and sharing my knowledge;
I also started writing a blog which you can read by clicking a link in the Table of contents.
My basic work philosophy is simple:
- Doing things properly is the only way of doing things
- Elegance permeates good code
- Hacks should be beautiful and applied with care