About me and my blog

Hi! I'm glad you're here, and I hope you find something interesting and useful in this blog. It serves an educational purpose and is a kind of notebook where I document what I've learned in computer systems and software engineering. So you are likely to find articles about computer systems architecture, embedded systems, operating systems, clouds, observability, performance tuning and troubleshooting, programming, automation, debugging, and so on. If you find a mistake or a typo, have an idea to discuss, or just want to tell me something, send me a message via any of the available channels and I'll be happy to chat with you!

I currently reside with my family in Seattle, WA. However, prior to moving to the United States, I also lived in Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. I've been working in the field of computer systems engineering for two decades. My formal education is in Telecommunications Engineering which I received at the National Technical University of Ukraine and graduated with a Master's degree in 2004. In my professional life, I have worked for companies in many different industries, including retail, e-commerce, Internet service providers, and multinational high-tech companies such as IBM and Google, to name a few. Throughout my career, I've been designing, building and maintaining various types of computer infrastructures, from on-premises (bare metal) to cloud computing, with the focus on automation and site reliability. Currently, I work as a Systems Development Engineer at Amazon to keep Amazon Linux a secure and reliable Linux distribution.

I also enjoy helping people learn and master something they are really interested in, but are either struggling to enter a new technical field or have difficulty organizing a self-learning process. At work, I have mentored my colleagues. As a part-time job, I've taught Unix/Linux systems engineering and computer network administration to students at several training centers.

My personal journey with computers began around 1992 when I started taking after-school programming classes at Sphere and had some fun with Basic on a Soviet PDP-11-compatible hardware. I continued writing some simple games in Basic at home when my parents bought me a ZX Spectrum, which was the iconic computer of the time. Later, when I got access to a PC with an Intel Pentium processor, I opened up a whole inew world of Turbo Pascal 7.0 and desperately tried to understand object-oriented concepts with the Turbo Vision 2.0 library. Last 2 years of high school I was taking extra programming classes and in 1998 I got certified as Assistant Programmer. In the first years at the university I discovered computer networks. During the day I was administering a FidoNet node on the dial-up line at home, but at night I was surfing the Internet. I was so interested in networking and Unix that in my last year at university I applied for the 2-year course of Computer Networks and Systems Administration at computer academy Step, which I finished in 2005 with a diploma with honors. During my master's program, I volunteered to help students from different departments better understand programming who were struggling with coding exercises in Assembler, C, C++, and Pascal. My professional career began the day after my birthday, in 2004.