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About this site

These are just some thoughts about this and that in the software industry, and elsewhere, by a long-time coder/hacker.

Privacy

This site does not track you. There are no cookies, no javascript tracking, no loading of icons or images from third party sites like Facebook, Linkedin or Google. The sites does not use Google Analytics or any other similar services. It's just you and the content you read. Noone is watching. I respect your privacy and your integrity 100%.

Except - for demonstration purposes i have added Disqus comments to an article showing how to enable disqus in stbl. If you open this article, disqus will track you, add cookies and try to make profit from that information. I have also added IntenseDebate comments to one article, where I show how to enable that for stbl. This will also add some tracking. IntenseDebate is a free service from the company behind Wordpress.

Code of Conduct

I speak my mind. I respect people who are honest. I change my mind when I realize I am wrong. I never change my mind to please bullies. I believe good people are those to are more concerned about their own conduct. I believe bad people are those who are more concerned about others conduct.

Credits

All pictures are either taken by me or friends of mine, or they are released with permissive licenses for republishing and changes (Wikipedia Commons).

About me

I am a Norwegian expat, currently living in a small village in Bulgaria with my 9 dogs and my computers.

Over the years I have worked with many programming languages. My preferred programming language since 1996 is C++. The code I write for my own projects usually runs on Linux, Windows and macOS.

Unlike many software developers, I have never had any desire to "move on" in my career and become a manager. I guess I love solving problems and writing code too much. I have worked in tiny startups, medium size startups, and for two years as a senior C++ developer in a giant software company. I have declined senior staff positions in two of the largest software / IT companies in the world. I treasure my personal and professional freedom more.

I am not a "Full Stack" or "Front End" or "Back End" developer. I have a wide surface of experience that makes it hard to put a simple label on it. I know how to make web sites, of course. I also know how to make native GUI applications for Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and IOS. I am best known for some of the servers and libraries I have written (most for the War FTP Daemon I guess). I have spent months optimizing a new thread-pool written in portable C++ for a sever application used by almost all medium to large companies in the world. I have written - and optimized - C++ database libraries, using sqlite, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres. Even Oracle (although I prefer not to talk about that). I have written hundreds of command-line programs.

Today lot's of people are embracing micro-services and REST. I am familiar with both. That is; splitting complex functionality into micro-services (which is hard to get right), and making components talk to each others. The talking part with REST I have used for quite some time - both on the client end and at the server side. I have also played with Googles more efficient alternative, grpc. And before that I used Zeroc's ICE and Corba. I have even used Sun's legacy RPC protocol over UDP for client/server communication.

In the last few years I have dived deep into kubernetes. Beside designing, optimizing, enhancing and maintaining cloud and edge micro-services and Large Data distributed applications, I have also worked extensively on deployments. In the process, I have developed a open source deployment app k8deployer with the aim to make it much, much simpler than helm to use, especially for developers in the development phase of a project. I am one of those crazy people who have a kubernetes bare metal cluster in my basement.

Besides being a senior software architect / developer, I have been:

Programming languages I am actively using:

Programming languages I have used professionally over the past 10 years:

Operating systems I have written software for

C++ technologies and libraries I use a lot today

Other programs / technologies I use often these days

Some things I have designed and implemented

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

Older

Internet protocols I have implemented from scratch

General Internet servers I have implemented singlehandedly from scratch

Internet / telecom protocols have I worked with at a low level

A handful of other technologies I have used over the years

Some of the things I have ported between operating systems

What people say about me

I've never seen so much passion for programming in one person until I met you :) Калин Благоев, Senior Software Developer