About me
| Where | We live in Mundelein, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. I was born in Kiev, Ukraine and moved to United States at the turn the century (could I be any more vague about it?..) |
| Family | Happily married, we now have a cute daughter. |
| Work | Since about April of 2007, I am a senior engineer with a very cool startup called Cohesive FT; our offices are in beautiful downtown Chicago right by the river. We are working on software appliances for financial messaging and much more.
If you are registered on LinkedIn, you can look me up there -
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| Interests | family, travel, bicycle, music, reading, home theater, economics, guitar (beginner level) |
| Technology | Linux, open source. I am especially interested in application infrastructure engineering, distributed applications, large-scale web site operations, and custom integration.
With a degree in Applied Mathematics, I also do quite a lot of development. I currently prefer Python for all complex tasks and shell wherever there is no need for Python. My current work is a Ruby shop, so I started developing in Ruby too. So far I still like Python more (Django is python's answer to Ruby on Rails; in fact, parts of this site are powered by Django). For most text processing (a very common task), I try to use sed as much as I can (I have to admit I only recently re-discovered its power) with a fallback option of perl. For web stuff, sometimes use PHP. I am also seriously considering writing a small project using some functional language (lisp, erlang or haskell) to get familiar with it (we had to do lisp and prolog back in school, but I don't remember anything). Another tool that I like a lot is GNU make. Sometimes many lines in a shell script can be nicely written in a neat Makefile, where you receive error checking and task parallelization for free out of the box. I managed to use make in places many people won't believe are possible... |
| Sports | Like to play tennis, ping-pong, badminton, pool (even though I am not particularly good at any of these sports). Up until I moved to the United States, I was a huge soccer fan with Dynamo Kiev (Ukraine) being my favorite team. These days, mainly due to time difference between us and Europe, I don't get to watch a lot of soccer. However, to fill the void, I became a big fan of Chicago Bears, representing what is known as football here and American football in the rest of the world. |
| Music | Ukrainian: Okean Elzy, Vopli Vidpolyasova; International: (too many to name but I will give a sample) Apocalyptica (plus other cello rock bands), Lordi, classical, Evanescence |
| Motto | Fubaredness Is Contagious.
While I was working at Orbitz, we came up with a more extended version of this phrase which went like this - Fubaredness is contagious: dealing with it all the time - costly, fixing it once and for all - priceless. This somewhat follows a well-known tag line from Mastercard TV commercials, but I still can't get the second part to sound well, so I am sticking with a short version for now. My motto became the name of my blog. |
| Favorite blogs | freakonomics.com and Marginal Revolution |
About somic.org
| somic.org is a personal web site of Dmitriy Samovskiy. I started running it roughly 6 years ago, when I first got a DSL line at home. Back then, I primarily used it to publish my photo gallery and for several other not-so-interesting services. The site was originally called somiconline.org, since somic.org domain name was taken by someone else (not anymore!) |