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My name is Dimitar Chakarov. I am a web-developer. It all started in school (math high school in Burgas) when a friend of mine and me spent some time trying to write a simple snake game in Pascal. We succeeded and I liked the feeling very much. So I started learning and writing. Or as the pros used to say 'programming'. I coded a fantasy football game (with very limited graphics - I am a developer, not a designer, after all) and I then spent a couple of weeks playing and fine-tuning it. In the end it turned out to be a very good game for all soccer lovers out there. Then I reached puberty and I got distracted. By girls. But that's another story.
Still in high school, I read some great articles on using assembler alongside my Pascal code, so I gave it a try. It was good - the pixels were showing way faster and everything was smoother. And cooler.
I played a lot of games in high school and read a lot of books - on and off the topic. Then I went to university - the Technical University of Sofia, to be exact - and I was a little bit scared. At first. My major was - is - Electronics and for that I needed to learn and understand a new programming language: C. I found it funny that the name of the language was simply the code name of the first successful project (after two failures beforehand). The fun stopped there and I started learning C so I could be prepared when we started studying it at the university. All in all it turned out to be quite easy to get the hang of it. So after two weeks I had a deep knowledge of C. Or at least that was what I thought.
The lectures started and then the labs started and I found I had gained some strengths after all. I helped some of my schoolmates with their studies and projects. I worked for a couple of months with Delphi (which apparently is Pascal for Windows). Meanwhile I got a lot of friends and my student life was amazing and pretty by-the-book. A lot of partying, stressful studying for exams and eating whenever I damn please (mostly in the middle of the night and mainly hamburgers). Sometime between all that I managed to learn C++ and write some more course projects, both mine and my fellow students'.
When all that partying started to get boring, I moved off campus and got a job in customer support. It was for a company named Orbitel and its main services were cheap voice calls, dial-up internet and email. So I began helping the clients who were using them. Everything changes, they say, and that is even more true when it comes to technologies. I had to be a fast learner, because the services provided by our company were changing every other day. So were my work hours. I learnt to adapt (or I had had it in me?) and I got promoted to senior customer support specialist. I had to do more tasks and also I had to train the "newbies". I succeeded to manage my time so well, that I even had time to write an application to help me and my colleagues in our day-to-day work. It was a very helpful tool which read the phone-log every 3 seconds and then, if there were incoming calls, searched the company database for a CLI match. If there was a match, the application displayed it on everyone's screen so one would know which client was calling. Then it wrote in a database, so our boss could be able to draw statistics for clients' problems (I coded those statistics too, of course). I wrote all that in PHP/MySQL. I learnt them quite easily - even easier than C.
All that seemed to have impressed my employers so they gave me a bonus (it was quite unusual for my position) and a couple of months later they offered me to join the developers team. I did. That's where I am working now. It is quite fun, actually. We have a great team, so it's never boring. I learnt a lot of new things - I wrote my first perl-script. Then I wrote a couple more. I discovered what CVS meant. And I am using it daily now. I learnt how to be a team player. I have my own project to manage. It is a support system, so we can better support our clients. It is quite complex, I think. And I am proud of it. I did a lot of small and not-so-small projects for the company and I think they all turned out to be useful.
Somewhere in between I enrolled to a Master's programme - I chose New Bulgarian University and my major was Software Technologies in Internet. I studied there for a year and it was very interesting. I got to know what PL/SQL was. I can use Java now. And Javascript too. Along with CSS and e-commerce. I attended a beginner's course in web design. Then my family and I moved to Burgas. I am now applying for a transfer to Burgas Free University so I can get my diploma.
I have some other interests as well. I have written several short stories, which can be found on my blog. I helped a friend with some of his movies and with his film studio's homepage. I enjoy watching TV shows so I am creating a site focused on shows. I am almost finished with another project - top3all.com. I am a big fan of Manchester United. I like to play World of Warcraft. And I have a kid. He is 2 month old and is kinda amazing. I wrapped up an image gallery for him as an excuse to learn AJAX.
Lately, I am learning Code Igniter - a php framework. I like it a lot. Pretty soon I will link to my first CI-driven project.