Hey, I’m Vladimir Link to heading

My journy with computers started somewhere in 2004. I was mostly assembling and configuring Windows machines for customers. A college of mine who was also mentoring me showed me hist computer running Suse and I was amazed by the beatiful desktop he was having. Of course wanting the same for my computer I got my first lesson - Learning is a constant. I got some manuals and the DVDs to install Novell Suse on my machine. I do remember that figuring out how to set up the Dial Up connection took me probably a week. Eventually I figured it out. Around the same time I was playing a lot with HTML and copy/pasting javascript left and right.

Fast forward to 2006 when I was already living in Germany for 2 years I bought an Ubuntu DVD and came back to Linux. I was looking for a job to support my studying and since doing HTML/CSS I was promoting myself as a Web Developer, but when I got an offer to create a simple phonebook for a potential client with Database I figured that I have a lot to learn and that’s when all started to roll faster for me. I started learning first PHP and MySQL. In couple of months I was able to create the Phonebook I was asked for (it was already late, but I was determined to do it). Later I stumbled upon Python and I fell in love with the langugae and how easy it was for me to express my intends. Since I was active in the Linux support community I started creating desktop applications. First working application that I shared was a python script with TK GUI, that was able to get a link to a page and download a FLV video file. Then link-shortening sites were the new In, so I set up myself to develop a link shortener desktop application that would use different link-shortening services the ugly mess of code is still available here: https://github.com/vkolev/pyBit2. One of the bigger projects was the gSharkDown application (sadly bitbucket deleted all my repositories, so no link but you can google it). I do remmeber that I wanted it to look perfect and that was my first 48 hours coding strike, but I achieved what I wanted - custom playlist, multi-threaded downloads and player. I also got my first glimps in collaboration - working with another developer from Argentina to add new features and figure out how to bypass the grooveshark restrictions. Second lesson learned - You can do anything if you are determined.

In 2011 I finally started a software developer job as a junior java developer at (I think) one of the biggest media companies in Germany - WDR. Everything was new to me (except Java). I remember when I got an E-Mail with the job-description and the used technologies - Oracle Database, Hybernate, JSF, SOAP, Services. A close friend of mine gave me the third lesson that I continue to follow - Never be scared of the things you don’t know. Since I was lacking confidence - I just started fast learning for 2 days all the best practices for the given technologies and I rocked the interview. I worked for WDR for 5 years and I started to love the Java, JVM and the surrounding frameworks and technologies.

In 2017 a new opportunity knocked on my door actually on my E-Mail while driving to Bulgaria for the Christmas holidays. I was offered a position as Python Developer. To work for a fast growing startup factor-a and to integrate Amazon Advertising API in the software. There I was faced with again new technologies and frameworks - Celery, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Scrapy, Kafka, Avro to name a few. I learned a lot there. I got to work in a great Team and to experience what SCRUM and Agile is. There are a lot of lessons learned there, but probably most importantly - always research your tooling before implementing.

Currently I’m interested in microservices and scalability of software. I find beatiful how different components can work and communicate together as a Team and hide all the inner-workings from the user. I love the challange of solving problems - that doesn’t mean once I solve a problem I’m directly bored, since once I find a sollution I have to improve it, refactor it and get the best of it.

So that’s me - a self-told software developer always eager to learn and improve.