Tag: life

I haven't done a public year-in-review in a long time. Everyone's saying how bad this year was globally, just like 2014, but, just like 2014, this year has been fairly positive for me. Especially compared to 2015.

I didn't write about 2015. Let me briefly recall it too. There was a repeat trip to Minsk, which left far less of an impression compared to the first visit. On the other hand, there was the first trip outside the CIS, to Bulgaria. I got a long-term visa for Bulgaria, but the end of the year crossed out everything positive… Just losing both the backup drive and the main one within a month was bad enough; in the end almost all the photos and logs were lost, only the most important stuff that was in the cloud remained.

Happy New Year!

The New Year is making its way across the planet. To some it has already come. Time to sum things up, to look back at what was important for me. The year will definitely be one to remember. It had changes, both good and not so good. My views on life changed, my values shifted.

On the whole, the year turned out positive, with changes, even though there was bad too. But on New Year's Eve you shouldn't be sad, you should have fun. I see that many of the people I know don't like the holiday atmosphere. I wish that everyone could welcome the coming year the way they want to, so that this kind of night could be spent pleasantly. Happy New Year, coming and already arrived!

The year is drawing to a close, and for some of my friends it's already over. Everyone's looking back over the year, so I'll try to note what made the passing year memorable as well.

Work started playing a bigger role; I spent the year wading through tons of crappy PHP code, and the number of completed projects has probably topped a hundred — honestly, I lost count long ago. The only break I got from work was the week exactly a year ago, but that's not in the cards for me now, since the first week this year is a working one, which means I'll have to work despite being hundreds of kilometers away from the boss.   A couple of weeks ago I started building a mid-sized project from scratch on the Yii framework, and oddly enough, this is my first genuinely serious site — before that I used ready-made solutions, and I hope that in the new year I'll get to do more programming rather than digging around in someone else's code.

I got promoted to lead programmer, my salary went up — laughable for such a position, though normal for Kherson. It's enough for me for now, and the work isn't too stressful, sometimes interesting, and I keep growing. 

There were quite a few material acquisitions: two game consoles, a DSLR camera, a new laptop, an e-book reader... I think I've started switching to licensed games thanks to the PlayStation 3 and even the New Year sale on Steam. I lost an excellent Nokia E61 smartphone — one more argument, it turns out, not to rush to work in the mornings, since it only brings losses. Well, I can't fully grasp the point of a rigid work schedule for developers. To replace the lost phone I got the simplest one from the same company, the 2323 — happy with it in every way :)

My real-life social circle shrank due to finishing university and being busy at work. Which I'm even glad about — it's calmer this way, I can control who I talk to and, for example, I don't have to deal with the old senile guy who likes to humiliate and bully others. Online I picked up a few new interesting contacts, which I'm glad about. I started fighting with myself less.

This year I stopped seeing the world through rose-colored glasses even more. I became convinced of the universal idiocy, not-giving-a-fuck, and incompetence of people in all spheres. I'm increasingly becoming like that myself, but what can you do, the place and time are what they are. At least online you can still shut it out for now.

If you look at the results online, then first of all, this year I paid for virtual hosting with a domain and moved my site to it from my home computer. Though I have neither the time nor the desire to work on it, since it's just a home page. I attached several domains to it, including a Cyrillic one. Also, exactly a year ago minus 12 hours, I switched to a paid LiveJournal account; in the summer I found time to change the look of the blog, made it more white-lion-ish. I started being more active on the social networks Twitter and Facebook, but compared to everyone else my activity is low.

And now about the most important thing. This was the year of the tiger, the year of the big striped fluffy cat. And with the tigers I got really lucky. I managed to capture unique shots of a clash between two tigresses at the Mykolaiv Zoo, which then ended up in the British newspaper Daily Mail and in top blogs, and they also talked about them on the radio. You can see all the photos of the clash via the image link at the start of the post. I never did manage to get money for the photos, but that doesn't matter.

It's funny that I lost my phone on the day I wanted to buy a new camera, and in the end I only managed to get it a week later, after which I immediately headed to the zoo to test it out and photographed the tigers. If it weren't for losing the smartphone, maybe there wouldn't have been any photos — an interesting coincidence.

All in all, 2010 can confidently be given a "+", unlike its predecessor. Let's see what my year brings, and what it brings to those who'll be turning another decade. I wish everyone a happy New Year — the one that has arrived and the one still coming. Happiness, luck, and the accomplishment of your planned goals or successful progress in your chosen direction.

A belated entry. Last week I had neither the mood nor the energy to write anything, though up until now I'd written something on the blog for every birthday, and this time I didn't even really hunt down or pull any April Fools' pranks. If you sleep 3-4 hours a day for several days, your emotions get nicely dulled and even bad thoughts don't upset you, though because of that you're a wreck, you don't feel like doing anything and work goes slower, but for that kind of salary there's nothing terrible about it, I keep on making sites and developing…

You couldn't call the day anything special, well, there was a little office party, like for all the celebrations at the office. As for presents, the only one worth mentioning is a figurine of a mountain ram with Swarovski crystals from my parents, I didn't get a third lion for the pride, probably it wasn't in stock. I'll also count a few lion books and a DVD as a good present, all that's left is to pick them up from the post office :)

On the other hand, on the eve of my birthday I found out that for now I'll remain the only full-time programmer at the company, because the other programmer is quitting since he's moving to a better job in every respect. I also found out that the office is moving in the coming weeks to a new place, from the city center closer to the outskirts to save money. Even though the new place is closer, getting there will be less comfortable, and there's nowhere to go at lunch. Interesting changes all the same, April won't be boring.

Attended the seminar "Which professionals 'survive' the crisis? Strategies for the balanced development of specialists". On the whole, I came away with a positive impression — it was presented in an interesting way and not boring at all, which is rare for this sort of thing. The main part took about 45 minutes and answering questions took 30 minutes. A lot of what was said is obvious anyway, but you don't always manage to express and put in order what's in your head, and when you hear it from the outside, everything falls into place and settles better. I also got new information to think about.

There were quite a lot of people at the seminar — representatives of various firms in the city, students and university lecturers. It's clear that some of the KhSU students were kept after class to fill out the crowd, but it was hardly the majority. I came, almost ran, after work, right before the start, and registered as number 65 on one of the lists — though it's not clear whether there was one list or several.

It was nice to see familiar faces I hadn't seen in a long time. I sat again at the same table in a lecture hall with classmates I'd sat with during our years of study.

I made notes throughout the seminar and wrote down some of the interesting bits — though there's not much at the beginning of the notes, since I was out of breath and recovering from the fast walking. In the end, enough thoughts and memories came up; most of them are laid out below. If I didn't mention something, it just means I agree with it.

Life is a curious thing. Just recently I was an unemployed graduate without any work experience whatsoever... And over the past week I've been at two jobs in my field. I wouldn't have thought it myself. And I wouldn't have thought you could find such a good job in Kherson as the one I landed at the end of last week. Now I just have to hold on to it.

Now a few notes on the "programmer in Kherson" job search. There is a point to posting your resume on job-search sites; more than two weeks passed from posting it to the call with the offer. I'm not counting one interesting offer by email from a neighboring regional center, and offers to earn money at home through clicks, mailings, advertising, distributing "Oriflame" products... And, finally, what really helped was that in my resume I mentioned the second place in Ukraine at the Junior Academy of Sciences, and I probably did the right thing by not writing in which discipline I achieved this. I still need to somehow fight against my inflated demands on myself and my low self-esteem, but that's more about taking the initiative myself — making calls and sending resumes to specific employers.

It's interesting, though — at the university no one cared about or was interested in past achievements, but for a good job they do matter. Thanks to everyone who pushed me and gave me the chance to prove myself. Although it's unlikely anyone will read this, I need to say it in person.