What's this all about?

What's this all about?

In the article I am going to answer these questions:

  • Who am I?
  • Why have I started this blog?
  • How does this site work?

So, let's start with the first. My name is Denis Savenko, my nickname is ZZa, you can meet it on StackOverflow and some other platforms. And answering the question in advance, it is not an abbreviation or something, just three letters, which were the closest to my left hand when it was on my keyboard :-) I am originally from Omsk, Russia, it is a city in Western Siberia with very cold and long winters, so as you can see I am used to challenges from my very birthday. And currently I live in Vienna, Austria.

I graduated from Omsk State University, the faculty of Computer Sciences in 2010, though my passion for technologies started many years before that. I was lucky enough to be born in a family where there was a computer since early 90-s (this is a very rare occasion for my home town), and even though my parents did not allow me to use it for a long time at once, as I was a child, I managed to nurture big interest of it anyway.

Back in the days I was studying in the university, I started my career as an ISP network administrator. There I was in charge of maintaining stability of a network of about 1000 customers' organizations. Those days I first time introduced myself to *nix-like operation systems such as FreeBSD and Red Hat Linux professionally (because our gateway servers were powered by them). However, being a system and a network administrator did not last long for me - after two years I decided to change my career path and became a software developer with a focus on data and databases.

I used to be the database team lead and a solutions engineer in the company I worked for at once. And currently I am more a consultant in one big company in telecom industry. I specialize on SQL, PL/SQL, #SmartDB paradigm, Oracle Database itself and everything which relates to these all. Recently I also started to explore the Kafka world to me for organizing reliable data pipelines between different data sources. I have more than 10 years experience in it at the time I am writing these words. Since I am also interested in development of reliable and scalable applications around my databases, currently I am as well developing my skills with Oracle APEX and will definitely continue doing this. I am always determined to learn new ways to do my job, to do it more effectively and with less effort, and APEX fits here perfectly.

If you want to contact me, please, use my LinkedIn profile and just drop me a message there.

Why I have started this blog?

There were in fact several reasons:

  • One of the best ways to learn is to Teach What You’ve Learned to Another Person. And this does work. When you try to express fresh knowledge in words, you consolidate it, and, on the other hand, by explaining something to others, you structure your knowledge and remember things better.
  • To keep my own notes and how-to's. I realized that through time some of my skills and knowledge tend to melt away. Especially when I don't use this thing in particular on every day basis or when I shift my duties to more management-related. This happened, for instance, to my *nix systems administration skills. I recently caught myself googling for an instruction on how to configure a network connection in CentOS (because of two things actually - it appeared I totally forgot the ifconfig syntax and, which surprised me even more, they just got rid of ifconfig totally). So, saving my notes is helpful for myself in the first place, and if they could help somebody else, this is just wonderful.
  • To show who I am to the world and market myself. Not long ago I came across an article which made me think a lot. And though I surely have some trail on StackOverflow, I still think I could contribute more to the community.

How does this site work?

Maybe you came here to find out how this blog works. So, there is absolutely no secret in it:

  • This site is hosted on my own very tiny server, which is connected to my home internet connection. Due to that, please be ready to see my blog down sometimes - unfortunately, I have neither a reserve power supply nor the spare internet connection and I think this is an overkill for a personal blog. However, the server is "on" 24/7, and I'm doing everything I can :-)
  • The server is powered by CentOS Linux with Apache httpd and nodejs installed. You could find out more on how the installation process was going in the related posts.
  • The blog itself is powered by Ghost blogging platform, which was made by developers for developers and could be obtained for your server anytime. And what I liked about it the most is that it is just as simple as a pie when you finish installing it.

Hope I successfully answered the questions which appeared in your head about me and my blog. Stay tuned for more interesting content!