At some point, I discovered that sysadmin work no longer excited me, and needed to take a new challenge.

Since, being a lazy sysadmin, I started automating everything I could with BASH scripts. So it felt natural to turn my gaze to development. To be honest, for a vast majority of my life I thought I’m not smart enough to be a dev. I’m still not entirely sure. So I took an online course, and started to look for opportunities.
That came in FFW, where I became somewhat of a developer. Well, Drupal was not what I expected development to be. Probably had too many expectations. Then came the big migration, went back to Plovdiv, and another opportunity came with Condor Gaming. There I realized that I do love development and this work is really exciting. After I was laid off at the start of the pandemic, I got another chance to hone my Frontend skills as well and still am in my current job position in ScratchMM.

I’ve always been passionate about computers, maybe too passionate, if you ask my parents. Maybe I started being my sysadmin career around 15 when I managed to get around the lock, that my old 486 PC had, which was supposed to disable my keyboard and render my PC useless. And my parents thought that will keep me away from that infernal machine. Well, not if it’s not connected to the motherboard. Check mate, mom :] I love you!

After this I went through a lot of different IT related (or not) jobs, and finally landed at Agria, where Oleg had the composure to help me not destroy the whole internal infrastructure :] Love you too, Oleg :]

Then came Opencode, which is by far my best job so far. I had many adventures there, I went to parts of the world I would’ve never been otherwise, made many great friendships, met many people I dearly miss now.

Then I came back to Plovdiv and Prime Holding taught me that I no longer have the same passion I used to. Being severely burned out didn’t help either…

As every kid – I loved drawing. I went on loving drawing in school to an extent that my notebooks were more filled with drawings, than that boring school stuff. My marks proved this as well :] I never got into it seriously enough, since I found the regular drawing courses boring, and didn’t care about them and boring concepts like shades and perspective.

Fast forward some 20 years and I entered a facebook contest for drawing a sheep. I lost it, even though I really liked the end result (to the left). Fast forward few more years, and we enter my 30th year, I met my wife, and started drawing some cute doodles mainly for her. And thus I rediscovered my interest in drawing, started drawing caricatures for the people in two of the internet forums I spammed at the time.

After that – went on drawing caricatures of my colleagues. To my great surprise – people loved my ideas, and I created my facebook page, and few years later – my caricatures site. I still draw caricatures. In 2018 I used the break and improved my skills with software drawing with a tablet and started making the caricatures more refined.

All of my caricatures are uploaded to this site. At the current time it’s undergoing a major rework, so I’m sorry. You can still check my facebook or deviantart pages.

At the moment of editing this page – I suffer from what I like to call “creative constipation”, I haven’t had an idea to draw for several months.

Well again – as most kids – I loved riding my bike. This love ceased around 4th grade when I got my childhood bike stolen, and with the money I earned selling newspapers that summer – I bought a Russian “Tourist Sport” bike. Maybe is was then that I stopped loving Russia that much. The thing was a torture machine – heavy, clunky, slow, attempts to change gear results in dropped chain. This infernal machine stripped me of any desire to ride a bike.

Fast forward 10 or so years and in 2004 I got my Sprint Meta Pro, a supposedly mountain bike, which threatened my life on several occasions (or my firm belief it was capable of mountain biking). 2008 – got my first mountain bike. I’ll always remember this Drag F4 and how bad it was designed. Still – ever since then – the bike got better and better and I have less and less time to ride it :'(

With the slow death of the mtb forums, people started dividing into different mini societies, I had no interest in joining any (not that type of person), and finding a group to ride became more and more difficult. And since I got into a serious relationship, that evolved into a marriage – time for riding became scarce. Getting fat didn’t help either.

In my forties I rediscovered this passion again, especially after I recovered from the knee injury I thought was going to end my sports “career”.

Ever since I first sat down in front of a PC (I think it was around 1988) I got really passionate about games. My classmates and I went to a “course” where all we did was play games. Oh, the times, a 5″ floppy disk with DOS, then load another floppy with the game itself. Oh, the memories. I might still keep these floppy disks around somewhere.

Since I got my first PC in 1995 (it was a long and funny story), it became really hard to separate me from it. My parents tried, yes, they did. All they achieved was me, learning how to disengage the lock of the PC 😛 And since then I had strong passion for RPGs, most notably Arcanum, Fallout (1,2, Bethesda’s fallout sucks big time), Diablo, The Elder Scrolls series and in later years – WoW and Lineage. I’ve spent embarrassing amount of time in Ark and Warframe.
The game I spent most time playing is Starcraft: Broodwar. I still play it, twenty something years after its release. I’m definitely not a fan of RTS games, but BW makes a huge exception.
I consider myself an RPG guy, as these types of games are the vast majority of stuff I play.

PC MASTER RACE!

Not sure who I have to thank this for – my parents or my grandfather (may you rest in peace, Dyado), but I do love being in the mountains. Ever since I was barely able to walk – I’ve been taken around the Rhodope and Stara Planina mountain ranges. 

Being in the mountains have always been where I recharge my batteries, liberate myself from the stress. When you pass a certain height – you leave the stress behind you and carry only what’s needed. Clean cold air, wind, the smell of the pine trees, the song of the birds, the deafening sound of silence when you go really high… It is there, that you realize how small you and your problems are.

There is no mountain range I prefer. I love them all – each having something I like and love. I hope one day I’ll be able to visit the Alps, the Andes, maybe even the Himalayas, although I’m not sure if I can survive the ordeal :]

From as far back as I remember – the music around me was rock. My father was huge fan of Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Rainbow, my mother loved Queen and Scorpions. So I was not capable of speaking, when I was singing along the above.

In the warm summer of 1992, my aunt took my cousin and ten year old me to the marketplace in Vraca. There we stood up to a place, where they were selling (mostly pirated) audio cassettes. My beloved aunt offered to buy us one each. At the time 2 Unlimited and Ace of Base were the most popular things, and I was kinda split between the two. Also at the time, in my class there was a cool guy that was listening to a scandalous band called Metallica. So after some hesitation – I surprised myself, my aunt, and the dude selling these records by choosing Metallica’s black album. The rest is an epic history of extreme metal.

I generally listen to a large variety of music, starting from classical music, some electronics, rock and metal. But metal is definitely the king for me. I rarely listen to Metallica nowadays, I can’t stand their music after the 90s, I later grew to love Slayer (which I abandoned after their masterpiece “Seasons in the Abyss”), and many more.

I consider myself a black metal fan, although you won’t see me with corpse paint and all the other clownery. I’m huge fan of Agalloch, Dark Tranquillity, Wintersun, Dimmu Borgir (which I adore up to “Death Cult Armageddon”), Dissection, Agalloch, Amorphis (up to “Am Universum”), I love the old Amorphis and these types of bands.

Lately I discovered and started listening to less popular bands like Solstafir, Be’Lakor and Belzebubs.

At the moment of writing this (2022) I’m learning to play electric guitar. Something I honestly have no talent for, but I also like challenging myself.

In the autumn of 2021 I decided to challenge myself with something new – I started to learn electric guitar. I’ve bought this cheap beauty, and so far I’ve been tormenting it with my lack of talent.

The same year I started taking guitar classes and I’m experiencing great progress, and from dreadful I’ve improved to terrible. I’m not in a hurry, haven’t got any unrealistic ambitions, I enjoy the progress more than anything.

My current progress I document in this youtube playlist. Listen at your own risk!

Well, I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not very good at this game. To put it lightly. I have a terrible first touch, I dribble like an one legged turtle, I’ve launched several footballs into Earth’s orbit during my shooting attempts, I’m fat and slow, the only thing I manage is passes. The only good thing about me and football is that I love the game and I give it all on the pitch.

I’ve been told that I have good read on the game, and I manage to play with my head, although I’m not so sure about it.

I have four seasons in the IT championship – three with Opencode Systems in Sofia and one with Programista in Plovdiv. In Sofia the team won twice the lower division title (picture is from 2015 celebrations), although I can’t say I contributed much.

Usually I play as a defender, although in the three seasons in the IT Championship I played one as a goalkeeper (couldn’t run due to an injury), the others – I was placed as a central forward, mainly not to screw things up in defense. I try to compensate the lack of serious qualities on the pitch with hard work and dedication, I try not to be selfish and play for the team. I can’t really tell if I manage or not.

With the recent history if injuries (most notably the knees) I’ve reduced quite heavilly the number of matches I play, still – I love this game and I enjoy every moment playing it.