beer planet

Updated: March 19th, 2008

This page contains my current resumes.

Note: since this information is semi-private, a password has been assigned to protect it. To view the rest of this page, please contact me using instant messaging or the About page.

Updated: March 19th, 2008

This page contains information about my current and past projects (work in progress):

• www.new-ipod.com and the GreenReporter application written entirely in Perl/Tk for the purpose of keeping track of freebie sites (freeipods.com, etc). Both have been sold to www.anything4free.com in the beginning of 2006.
• distributed multi-machine video fetch and processing system
• distributed cron replacement system
• threaded multi-machine SVN updater

Updated: March 19th, 2008

This is my personal blog.

Timeline (constantly updated):
June 1983

16: Little me is born in Kharkov, Ukraine.

May 2006

8: It's Milla's birthday and she gets the best present ever.

June 2006

16: I turn 23. Not too happy that I'm this old.
21: My first day at the new job: Blinkx.
25: Cambridge business trip. After 3rd day of work, scary, but exciting.

July 2006

8: I visit London while I'm in the UK.
21: I return from the UK after almost a month, happy to see San Francisco again.

October 2006

7: ATB visits San Francisco with a live concert at club 1015 Folsom. I have a ton of fun.

February 2007

10: I am in Seattle with Zhopik on our anniversary vacation. The flight arrives early, we get the last 2 tickets to the Ducks of Seattle, Safeway and a movie theater are across the street from the hotel, and the hotel rocks! What a good start.

March 2007

17: My car gets broken into on Milla's parents' driveway. RIP radar detector, iPod Mini, and GPS charger.

April 2007

1: I become Senior Software Engineer at blinkx.
16: My car gets broken into the 2nd time in a month. In the middle of a parking lot on Embarcadero in broad daylight. RIP 2nd GPS charger.
16: Blinkx is set to go public. Good or bad? We'll see.
28: Sergio and I go see Paul Van Dyk live in concert at 1015 Folsom and enjoy 5 hours of godlike trance.

May 2007

23: Blinkx goes public on LSE (AIM) under the symbol BLNX. It gains 40% on the first day.

June 2007

12-28: Zhopik and I visit Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia as well as my mom and grandma. There are lots of pictures here.
26: I sample Absinthe in St Petersburg (King of Spirits).

July 2007

28: Ruslan, Lera, and I crash the long-awaited Tiesto party at the Civic Center Auditorium.

August 2007

12: Had a lot of fun paint balling for the first time at Sherwood Forest with Vica, Misha, and Z.

As half of the world population already knows, the MySQL conference is coming in less than 3 weeks. Since this event only happens once a year, lasts only 4 days, and costs more than a Russian mail-order bride, I'd really like to get the most out of it. Considering that the schedule is completely packed, with 8 (!!) events going on in parallel, I imagine things can get a little frantic. Additionally, I've never been to a conference of such size before and I'm not sure what to expect.

So… I'm contemplating:

• printing out the event schedule and drawing a zig-zagging "map" of exactly where I'll be jumping to next, once the previous presentation ends. I'm actually wondering if I'll need to figure out where all the events are located exactly in advance. How big is that place? Did Google invent in-building walking maps yet? Do people normally jump from one presentation to another parallel one or is that unheard of?

• bringing a laptop to take notes. I find it that my brain tends to retain mostly the general ideas for a good period of time. Code details and specifics tend to flush a lot sooner. Keeping notes (and publishing them online) is the best way to retain all this tasty information. Learn it and starting doing it, don't be lazy. For my note taking application, I actually prefer Microsoft (:gasp:) OneNote. It keeps things organized and has a coupe of neat tricks up its sleeve, like built-in OCR, Win-S shortcut for a quick area-defined screenshot, integration with Outlook, audio note-taking. Aha!..

• recording audio at every presentation, is that allowed?

• getting plenty of sleep the night before each conference day, as the amount of information is going to be simply crushing. I guess I'm going to have to postpone my 3am sessions until Friday or so.

• bribing an organ thief to steal Peter Zaitsev's brain and replace it with a statistical computer chip capable of running 17 billion MySQL benchmarks a second. Nobody is going to notice the difference anyway.

Do you have any tips? How do YOU handle conferences? Please share in the comments.

Updated: March 26th, 2008

April 14-17th is going to be an exciting time. Why? Because the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo is going to be held in Santa Clara, CA. Who would want to miss out on a chance to lurk around, let alone talk to, some of the smartest people in the MySQL world? Well, those who don't have at least $1000+, of course. A 3 day pass to the conference without tutorials costs a whopping $1199. A full pass would dry up your pockets $1499.

Well, "good news everyone". Thanks to Sheeri Cabral of The Pythian Group, PlanetMySQL.org, Jeremy, and, most importantly, LinuxQuestions.org, I am now in possession of a 3-day conference pass!! I'm incredibly excited that I will be able to attend and finally meet many geniuses, including the ones mentioned on my Must-Know People In The MySQL Field page. I've never won anything worth over 50 cents before. As a funny side note, there were 4 pages of replies to the raffle post, 90% of them saying that they could not attend (mostly due to living in other countries), so in reality only 2-3 people out of everyone could actually attend. I like those odds.

Here is a link to the oh so colorful conference schedule. I'm particularly interested in this short list of highly exciting subjects:

April 15th

• State of MySQL - the keynote by Mårten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL).
• Performance Guide for MySQL Cluster - parallel query processing guide perhaps?
• Lessons Learned in Building a Highly Scalable MySQL Database - definitely need more lessons.
• Big Bird (Scaling Twitter) - should be fun, considering I heard twitter was started in ruby on rails and had major problems scaling out.
• InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and New Features - an update would be nice, kthx.
• Dramatically Improving MySQL Database Performance in Data Warehouse Applications - more lessons!
• Investigating Innodb Scalability Limits by Peter Zaitsev from MySQL Performance Blog!
• Disaster is Inevitable—Are You Prepared? by Farhan Mashraqi from Fotolog.
• Mitigating Replication Latency in a Distributed Application Environment - I need to get rid of these constant replication lags already, for the love of god!

April 16th

• Portable Scale-out Benchmarks for MySQL - tasty MySQL bench goodies? Sign me up.
• Applied Partitioning and Scaling Your Database System - sharding, disk spanning? Whatever this will be, I'm all ears.
• Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design - I'm very interested in this new, very promising future replacement engine for MyISAM.
• Astronomy, Petabytes, and MySQL - sounds like fun. I liked astronomy… I think.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part I) - more tools, invaluable.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part II) - even more? Tool overload for today.

April 17th

• A Match Made in Heaven? The Social Graph and the Database - by Jeff Rothschild from Facebook.com, sounds like something to wake me up in the morning.
• Stored Routines: Tips, Tricks, and Solutions
• MySQL Proxy, the Friendly Man in the Middle - probably one of the most interesting things in development right now.
• Sphinx: High Performance Full Text Search for MySQL
• Helping InnoDB Scale on Servers with Many CPU Cores and Disks - more scaling, always good.
• MySQL Hidden Treasures - man, how do I combine 3 sessions that go on at the same time?
• Top 20 DB Design Tips Every Architect Needs to Know
• Partitioned mySQL and …. realtime - by Dathan Pattishall from Flickr.
• Deadly Sins Using MySQL and PHP - by Arjen Lentz

April 18th

• temporarily unload all the information gathered in the previous 3 days and drown in beer

Excitement is in the air. Can you FEEL IT?