Hi, my name is Marek. I live in a small country in the heart of Europe, Slovakia 🇸🇰, where I work as a software engineering company.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve found computers and technology fascinating and they naturally attracted me. The first language I came into contact with was Lua. At the time I was 14 or so, and I was playing the World of Warcraft (WoW) with my friends. I wanted to learn how the mods work in this game, and even write my own. They were written in Lua, so I’ve wanted to properly learn it, but I’ve never found time for it, and my knowledge never reached beyond the simplest things such as simple macros for selecting a random mount.
The first programming language I actually learned was Pascal, which was thought at my high school. I spent four years getting better at programming, but Pascal was not enough. It felt old, and I’ve never heard about any interesting project written in it. And as they say, the grass is always greener on the other side, so I’ve decided to try other languages.
For a short while I dabbled with Java, but I didn’t like it (mostly because of the fact that there is a null pointer exception in a language that doesn’t even have pointers!), and I’ve decided to try C++ instead (it at least had pointers 😀). Even though I’ve been using it for more than 10 years, I still don’t think that I’ve learned it, and I strongly doubt that it is possible to learn in its entirety.
When I graduated from the high school, I was deciding what to do next. My passion for programming was competing with my love for physics and natural sciences in general. I think that programming and quantum mechanics are the closest things to the real-world magic that we can get to, and magic is very cools, so I wanted to learn as much physics as possible. For a quiet some time I was contemplating whether I should choose computer science, software engineering or natural sciences. In the end I’ve decided to study physics because it would allow me to satisfy both my love for programming and help me gain knowledge of the natural world that I’ve desired so much.
At the university I’ve also learned Matlab/Octave, Python, C, Java (properly this time), and CUDA. Moreover, I’ve applied my skills on real scientific problems and I’ve used programming to calculate important data for my research, and later to process, and visualize them. Without an ability to write code I would have to choose a very different path in my life, and I couldn’t focus on computational physics either.
During my university life I’ve also learned several numerical methods, all of which fascinate me until this day, including Monte Carlo methods. I’ve been using Metropolis algorithm to study properties and phase transitions of the frustrated magnetic systems. In 2019 I’ve earned my Master degree in the theoretical physics at the Pavol Jozef Å afárik University in KoÅ¡ice. After that I’ve decided to continue my education. I was still trying to solve the mysteries of frustrated Ising antiferromagnets, but I’ve also learned a few new tricks, and even got an opportunity to teach problem solving sessions. In the august of 2023, I’ve finished my PhD study.
At the moment I work for an international company, which offers software engineering services to other companies. I’ve started as a QA engineer tasked with maintenance and improvement of automated tests written in Python and Selenium, and after the original project I worked on ended, I’ve become a backend software developer. I’ve worked with various programming languages and technologies, including Java, Javascript, Typescript, OpenSearch, PostgreSQL, REST APIs, GraphQL, RabbitMQ, Jenkins, Github Actions, AWS, Terraform, Ansible, and many more. The variety keeps me interested and I really like my job.
Besides work I still love programming and I sometimes start a new personal project, or try to learn a new technology. For example, the last year I’ve learned Go for fun, and started rewriting various small scripts that I regularly use into Go. In addition to Go, I would also like to learn Zig, and maybe some frontend framework, and I am really looking forward to Mojo programming language being done. In the recent years I’ve also took interest in the increasingly popular machine learning and AI. I am by no means an expert, but I find it fascinating, and I would love to learn more.
In my free time I love to read sci-fi and fantasy books, exercise with kettlebells, play RPGs and base-building/automation games, and practice calligraphy.
I’ve started this blog to both document my journey, and (hopefully) to help others to learn these amazing skills.