About — Sergey Denisov

I grew up and studied in a mid-sized Russian city in what Russians call the Far East and what most Americans would consider part of Siberia. It was much closer to China than to Moscow.
I studied C++ during my first year at university using a book on Borland C++, though I cannot recall the author now. I remember struggling with the three-part for loop for about a week, but once it clicked, everything else felt easy.
After that, I learned Java and built a chat application, because chats were the thing at the time. I was not trying to turn it into anything serious; I just wanted to see whether I could build one too. It used applets and AWT, and it was full of multithread bugs.
In my twenties, Perl was my favorite language. It was also disappointing to watch Perl 6 arrive so late that it never really gained traction.
Programming languages have always excited me. I studied many of them over the years. In general most of them are very similar, with Haskell standing out and Prolog being a notable weirdo.
I am currently learning Spanish, and it turns out learning a third language is much easier than learning a second. Qué tal, amigo!
At university I also wrote in assembly language for both x86 and an embedded RISC controller. Later, it was a revelation to see how much of that work could be done in C without losing much, and how directly C maps to machine instructions.
My degree was in computers and systems design, but the Russian chip industry died long before I graduated, so I either had to pivot to soldering printers or to writing software. I was never a fan of soldering, so here we are.
I was a PhD student for a while, though I did not finish the program, and taught database and networking courses at my alma mater for two semesters.

A few things about me