Introduction, and welcome!

Welcome, dear reader! As you see, this is the very first post on this blog, and neither you nor I have an idea how it will further develop. After a very long time of not blogging or writing, I decided to start again. My old blog and writings are long gone, and they would be of no interest now. So, a fresh start…

Just let me introduce myself in slightly more detail than my ‘About’ short note. My name is Dimitry Slabko, I am originally from Russia, from the beautiful city of St. Petersburg. Now I reside in Mexico, in a nice cozy little town San Miguel de Allende.

I have been programming since late 90’s, and adopted .NET development since its version 2.0, almost from its release date. I did WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET, WCF, MVC, and even some WebForms. I was very glad to switch to .NET Core, I even thought something along the lines “finally, a properly designed .NET version”.

Last quite a few years I have been doing Web, services, and cloud development. Mostly pure backend, pure .NET . With a large bit of SQL sometimes.

So, yes, software development had become a passion for me, even though I was not aware of that for a long time. Nonetheless, I came to acknowledge and accept that :) It is a craft that has a potential of becoming an art at times. It is also a craft that can be (or seem) tedious, but even then, it is rewarding.

Sometimes even in ways I could not have anticipated. Just recently I had a chat with an ex-colleague, we worked together for a few years in a team developing a project that I could call ‘a project of my dreams’. As it often happens, life has its own realities, and our company was bought by a larger company, and then they sold out those ‘assets’ they had not much use for, including the department responsible for the project. The new owner was quite happy to acquire developers with the expertise they needed. However, they already had a competing product. So, my ‘dream project’ was doomed to oblivion, as it seemed. So, I drifted away, changed the job.

But what my ex-colleague told me amazed and amused me deeply. Our ‘dream project’ had gained a lot of love from its customers, most of them stuck to it even in spite of no further development and unmaintained servers. It remained performant, robust, and easy to use. The competing product that the new owner had so much hopes for, on the contrary, was not doing quite well. In fact, it was becoming so unwell that they decided to switch their customers to our project which they inherited but had been neglecting for a few years. Guess what – now it is being actively developed again and gaining new customers fast!

This story was really inspiring and rewarding. I felt really proud for my work, as I have probably never felt before.

And just to conclude my introduction – in many senses, I am a human being as many-many others on this planet. Enjoying life, loving my dear wife, cherishing moments spent with my friends, eager to travel and discover new places, fond of good movies, books, music, and wine.

PS: I aim to make this blog useful for fellow developers, and already have a few posts planned and dedicated to how to write simple good code and solve various challenges.