Who I am

Hi there 😀👋!

My name is Oleksandr (sometimes other guys call me Oleks or Alex for short, I’m totally fine with all of these names).

I’m 27 at the time of writing this post, and I’m about 7 years in IT sphere already.

Disclaimers

I’m not a native English speaker and moreover writer so please forgive me for grammatical and idiomatical mistakes - I do my best to improve my English level (that’s actually why I decided to run my blog in English). Any comments and critics are appreciated.

My first computer

I started my way of getting familiar with computers when I was 10 (it was way back in 2005). My parents gifted me a computer on my 10th Birthday and I fall in love with it. It was Intel Celeron-based computer with Windows XP on board. That day my life changed 🙂.

Do you guys remember this gorgeous nostalgic “Bliss” wallpaper on Win XP?

I think that was one of the most useful and right gifts I’ve ever got, and I’m very thankful to my parents for that. They worked hard to earn money for this first computer.

There is one fun story about my first steps in the world of computers. Nobody in my family was really familiar with computers so my father asked his friend to teach me how to use all of these fancy things.

“Well, here is a mouse, and it has two buttons - left and right. You need to use the left button for almost all the things you want your computer to do” - he said to me.

“Cool! And what is the purpose of having another button then?” - I was curious.

“You know, in the very beginning you do not need to worry about it, and actually it’s better to do not press it at all” - he answered with a smile.

I understood it literally and even did put a match under the right button in order to eliminate all possibilities to press this “scary” button which can explode the whole planet as I thought then 😂.

Now nobody believes me that it is true when I’m telling them this story, but it is!

During the first two or three months, I was using the computer for pretty usual and common stuff - listening to the music, playing games and watching movies.

But after some time I became curious about how this whole thing works. That was one of the crucial days in my life - I followed the white rabbit and immediately fall into a rabbit hole :)

After a couple of months, I found myself reading a computer-related book “Windows for Dummies”. It was late 2005, I had a paperback copy and was reading it the whole day and night long.

Then I started helping my friends to “fix” some common issues with their computers or to do some common things such as installing games from disks, using Daemontools and NoCD to bypass different security checks, copying disks, scanning and printing documents (I’ve also got EPSON scanner and laser Canon printer from my parents). What a gold time it was!

How I met your Linux

When I was 12, it was the first time when I met Linux 😂. One of my father’s friends bought a computer and got stuck on even using it for some dummy things like watching movies and reading documents. My father asked me to take a look at it and help this guy. We came to his house, went to the table where the computer was placed, I pressed the “power” button … and was really surprised.

“What the strange Windows it is???” - I thought. I saw some strange unknown desktop on the screen and was really curious about the things like “where is ‘My Computer’ icon, where is a ‘Start’ button” and so on 😂.

I said that I cannot help because dunno what to do with this “wrong Windows”. Only 3 years after I’ll see the same desktop and realize that it’s his excellency Linux.

TL;DR My way into IT and CS

I finished 9 classes at school and applied for college in 2010.

My family was not so rich so my parents told me that it will be hard for them to pay for my education in the college and the only possible way to get into was to pass on the grant program.

I tried to apply for two specialties - Electricity Engineering (as my dad and grandfather were) and Computer Systems and Networks. There was much easier to get a grant for the Electricity Engineering specialty as there were more spaces. But fortunately, I was able to get a second place in the ratings and apply for CS speciality.

There were good days, a lot of knowledge and fun.

In college, we were studying a lot about different aspects of Computer Science - from “How does a processor work” to “How to make this shitty piece of code written in Pascal or C++ work”. We even had some soldering classes.

4 years after I graduated from the college with a Jr. Specialist diploma in hands and my University journey started in 2014.

I applied for “Computer Science” Bachelor’s program at Kharkiv National Aerospace University.

I was really disappointed by the level of education here as it was way lower than in the college. Anyway, there also were many interesting things such as “Why an aircraft or rocket can fly”, “How can I integrate my small software for calculating aircraft wing parameters with monstrous CAD systems such as CATIA and AutoCAD to get a completely finished blueprint of this wing” and so on. But I lacked the level of software engineering classes.

In my university group, all of us were dreaming about working for “big” IT companies and being cool programmers. I was really impressed by some of my Dad’s friends’ relatives who were working as “programmers” and were even able to travel to the USA, Norway, Finland, and the UK. What a great life they had I thought! I’m originally from a small village and even the idea of traveling abroad seemed out of reach for me.

One day a dean of my faculty asked me:

“Do you know such a company - EPAM?”

“No” - I said.

“Well, they are going to start some external courses and then internship programs and they’ll be testing our students to select them to take part in these initiatives” - dean said then - “I’d like you to participate in the testing”.

“Okay, why not?!” - I answered not even thinking that it was a real chance.

The next day I answered a test, there were about 3 hundred students in the room. Answered and forgot about it.

Imagine how I was surprised when after a month or so I was called by HR from EPAM and been told that they are ready to give me a place in the group for external courses. Also, a couple of my close friends were also selected for the course.

We had 2-3 hours of classes late evening twice per week for three or four months. There was a group of about 40 people in the room, half of them were as young as I was, but there also were a lot of guys who had already passed their 30 or even 35.

After each class, we were tasked with some problems related to the lecture topic and there was only one week to do it. I can say that it was really tough to meet this deadline 😀.

We were studying the next things here along the course:

• Virtualization (Hyper-V and VirtualBox)
• Bash scripting
• PowerShell scripting
• Networks
• Linux and Windows administration
• Databases (MS SQL server)

Believe me or not, but I was excited that there is an ability to run OS within Virtual Machine!! I did not have an idea of virtualization before the program. Whole new bright world just opened up before me.

Despite interesting topics, it was really hard to do not fail deadlines or just simply solve all the homework tasks. A lot of guys just gave up and dropped from the course (including my friends 🥹).

At the end, we were interviewed. The purpose of the interview was deadly simple - select 10 of us out of 40 and invite them to take part in the internship.

It was my first “job” interview. One of the scariest moments in my life so far 😂.

An Interviewer was a huge stout man with big mustaches. He grabbed my CV (and believe me I put in everything that I even barely know in the CV), ran through it for a minute and said:

“Well, boy, now I gonna teach you a first ever lesson in your professional life - be ready to answer each item in your CV” - and then he started torturing me :).

I remember only one question (and I feel really ashamed about my answer till now 😂):

“I see ‘Databases’ in your CV. Great, could you please tell me what is index for in a database?”

I thought for a moment (my head was empty and all the ideas were mixing and running away) and said with confidence:

“We need indexes as they are indexing a database” (LOL).

The Interviewer laughed aloud for about a minute. And finally said:

“You know, you are dead right and it’s hard to argue 😀”.

I was sure that I had failed an interview… But sometimes our life is a pretty unpredictable thing, full of surprises both good and bad ones.

Long story short - I was invited for an internship and that’s how I started my career in a big IT company as I dreamed.

And I started just from the hard one - Systems engineer.

What I’m doing now?

It’s almost a year now since I left EPAM after 6 years. I’ve managed to climb from a student to Lead DevOps engineer and from a silly boy to a mature enough (I believe) guy with extensive tech experience and not-so-bad managerial skills.

Currently, I’m working for SoftServe as a Lead DevOps engineer and as a Cloud Architect. Both doing by hand and talking in meetings 😀.

I continue studying and widening my views on IT. During the last couple of months I was feeling up to do something new - that’s why I started this blog.

So I welcome you here and want to encourage you - please do not hesitate to say anything you want in the comments.

If you want to reach me out - please look for links just below my photo on the left side.