It’s been a long time since I last blogged, and it seems I miss it, so I decided it’s time to write a new post and try to start to write more frequently again.

If you follow me on  twitter, you probably already know that, but it has been 2 months since I have left Obecto and started working at VMware Bulgaria.

This is a big change in my career and again it wasn’t that easy.

Working at Obecto was really cool! The people I have met there are very enthusiastic professionals and best at what they do. They are one of the Flex pioneers in Bulgaria, making great applications and as you know I am a Flex geek. I’ve learnt a lot working with guys like Todor and Vladi and all other colleagues. I had the opportunity to work on a big, unique and EXTREMELY interesting project, doing things that I am willing to bet no one had done with Flex. It was a pleasure working there and I am going to miss the atmosphere and the whole team. I can only wish them to continue with their passion making great projects and best of luck!

As I said it was fun, but I decided that it is time to move on. I cannot share a lot about my experiences so far at VMware, but I think it is great. I am still getting used working at such a large company with lots of colleagues and so much products and I am still getting confused sometimes with this “Inception thing” (VM inside of a VM) ::) Literally I am overwhelmed by information, but still want more. I like how I am constantly motivated to learn new things and be better. I also find it outstanding how developers are provoked to innovate and come up with new ideas, and how they are acknowledged.
A lot of things have happened these two months and I am so excited for the future, I am sure it will be interesting.

So what is next?
Be more awesome, of course! 🙂 I will continue with this blog and I will try to write interesting posts as before. I think now is a good time to say that this will continue to be my personal blog and will not represent thoughts and strategies of VMware

P.S. And since I am writing this when the hype is on whether Flex/Flash will live… I am sure there will be more mind-blowing websites and applications built with them.

I am happy to announce that I have successfully graduated the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University “st. Kliment Ohridski” with bachelor’s degree in computer science.

You might ask, why I am so happy to write about that? The thing is that 4 years ago I graduated the Professional High School of Tourism in Sofia, with degree in hotel management. However even when I started studying there, my passion was in computers. The last 2 years in high school I had to study hard mathematics at home, and at private courses, because, as you might have guesses, at my high-school the level of math education was not that high. So with lots of hard work I was the only one from my school to be accepted at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics. And that was win No. 1

Win No. 2 – my bachelor degree, came even harder and tougher. Imagine the jokes that I received from some of my co-students, that had graduated high schools school with intensive learning of mathematics, and their belief that I will not be able to make it. Challenge accepted! That is why now the taste of success is even sweeter.

The whole thing that I am trying to say is that, these 4 years proved to me that nothing is impossible as long as you wish for it hard!

Now I am off to achieve the next big challenge!

I cannot say I have a lot of experience as a developer. I cannot say that I am ready to teach someone how to write code. I cannot say that what I am writing in this blog is always right.

What I can say is that I always have thirst to learn new things, new techniques. Willing to listen to new ideas, willing to discuss them and willing to share my experiences.

What I am saying is that I am always open to learn, open to try something new, and I think every developer should be. Sure I make mistakes, but making errors and then fixing them is making me better at what I do.

I said all of this, because I think it is time to step up my game. After few conversations with colleagues from work and college whether I am ready to guide other developers, give advices about what and why, and whether have the confidence to do it, I decided that I am not 🙂 But I won’t be ready even in 10 years if I don’t start from somewhere.

I have this idea for a posts about how to improve the quality of your code. Why? Being a developer at Obecto I am constantly observing the goodness of quality code and I’m practicing on writing one. What I realized is that the point is not always just to make things work. No. Very often you should write something that is less expose-able for bugs, something that is easy to maintain, something other developers could understand, that can extend and something that you can change later on and to still work.

I won’t step in into discussions of why and how to write good code, there are other books, papers and articles that cover that. In fact  you can check out this great article written by colleague of mine Vladimir Tsvetkov What’s wrong with the creative community of Flash? in which he writes about the problems of software engineers and how they can level up.

What I will do is explore and give my opinion on certain practices and tools to help us make better looking code.

I will try to make a series of posts on that topic, starting from Improve your code using Sonar with Flex plugin

WOW Just a couple of hours ago I wrote my last post and now another one! I was just redesigning my blog and adding new features when I saw my first post… it was written on 8.8.2009!!

So it’s now an year of blogging. I didn’t write a lot, but I surely enjoyed the posts I have created.

Let me tell you the truth. I have started this blog with the idea to be a technical blog mainly about flex, to learn new things, to share them with the readers and hopefully some of you learnt and started using new (good) things.

Just for the record I wanna put out brief statistics of my blog.

• 1990 – Absolute Unique Visitors
• 3989 – Pageviews
• 01:53 – Time on Site
• Keywords – Visits
  1. flex spring file upload – 35
  2. “flex 4” perspective projection – 33
  3. flex browsing directories – 30
  4. blazeds+upload files – 14
  5. flex custom layout – 13
  6. flex 4 custom layout – 12
  7. flex spring upload – 11
  8. spring flex file upload – 11
  9. flex upload – 9
  10. “springflex-server” – 8
• Oh yeah, and Flash Player versions (this should be interesting). From total visits 2606, only 64 (2.46%) didn’t have flash player

Ok maybe you think this is not a lot of visits, but for me it is! It is very significant that almost all of the visits are purposeful, and the audience is just the one, for which the content of my site is.

I think I’ve succeeded with my plan and I have put up the foundations on which I will continue to build up knowledge.

I want to thank all of you that are supporting me by subscribing to my RSS, writing comments, writing me mails and of course taking the time to read one of my articles. Hope that I will continue with writing interesting stuff here

Man, It has been a good year!!