My personal user manual #
(a manual how to “use” me)
Part 1 (formal) #
Pronouns #
He/Him
Timezone/Working hours #
EDT (UTC-4)
More productive at the second half of the day
Communication preferences #
1. Telegram2. email3. SMS
….1000. phone call
Professional background #
- master’s degree in CS (systems engineer)
- was working as L1 tech support
- Software Engineer since 2009
- Platform Engineer since 2013
- “DevOps Engineer” since 2015
Strength and skills #
- I know how computers work and why they don’t
- think for a few steps ahead
- have a good sense of humor
Development areas #
- English language
- Kubernetes
- Golang
How you like to receive credit/praise and constructive feedback #
Prefer direct and fast feedback - as soon as you see I am doing something wrong - please tell me why.
However, I most probably will object if I believe I’m following best practices, so woudl appreciate some arguments.
Outside of work hobbies #
- riding a motorcycle
- ping-pong (amateur level)
- playing acoustic guitar (below amateur level)
Personal development goals #
- CKA
Part 2 (informal) #
What You Should Know About Me #
- Born and raised overseas:
- I use Celsius, not Fahrenheit (but okay with miles and pounds)
- I am totally unfamiliar with the cultural domain from pre-K/school/college (something you might consider obvious, I have never heard of or seen)
- English is not my first language:
- If I say something weird (or even rude), it’s most probably unintentional, using the wrong wording, etc
- I appreciate spelling corrections greatly
- I love puns and wordplays and do my best to understand them
- I haven’t seen Star Wars (sorry, I tried, but that train seems to have passed), Star Trek, and have never read comic books
- I’ve read a lot of 60s-90s Sci-Fi and fiction literature, including but not limited to authors from the USA
- What are your top 3 books?
- I don’t drink coffee; I take tea
- I love customization and use shell/git aliases a lot, as well as tiny utilities to make things pretty or colorful (like grc or kubecolor)
Fun facts about me #
- I’m left-handed
- I was born in the empire/country, which no longer exists - USSR or Soviet Union
What I consider common sense #
- the one and only data format is YYYY-MM-DD (you’ll agree with me when you try to sort lines/files in another format)
- splittint is much harder than joining (Cinderella was told to sort a pile of seeds and grains, an impossible task, but mixing them together was easy)
- Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Personal opinions about different stuff #
git push --forceis evil- avoid it, unless it is a final step for a long-lasting PR to prettify commits history
- force-pushes might make PRs of your peers fail
- however, nasty git history is much more evul, so please rebase (squash/fixup) and force-push your branch if you are changing 2 files with 135 commits
Things I can help you with #
- Complex git tricks (rebasing, history rewriting, bisect search, conflict resolution and avoidance, hooks)
- Python code, including linters/tests, list/dict comprehensions, parameter parsing, simple CLI scripts, and simple web services (Flask)
- Groovy code (in a limited scope of Jenkins job/library)
- Ansible: I love this tool and use it, for example, to bootstrap/update macOS laptops to keep the settings consistent across hardware migrations
- Docker: Adopted it since the 0.7.x version when only Linux was supported. I may not be aware of its latest features, but knowing the underlying principles (lxc, cgroups, namespaces…) helps with troubleshooting
Things I need help with #
- Kubernetes and authentication (IAM, SSO, OAUTH)
- writing documentation (especially style/grammar)