I am Ivan Nikolov and I am a technical architect and a technology enthusiast. In 2011 I finished my BSc in Computer Systems and Technologies at the Technical University of Sofia with a gold medal for exceptionally high achievements. Then I was accepted to study MSc in Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. There I studied in the area of Analytic and Scientific Databases, hence what the magic that makes databases work is and also I strongly focused on cloud computing. In 2012 I graduated from the University of Edinburgh with an award of distinction.
I have a relatively rich engineering career, which started while I was still doing my undergrad. I’ve been through different technologies – from Microsoft ones primarily working on Windows, to open source stuff that is supposed to work on pretty much any environment. In my free time I also do a lot of programming – this helps me keep up to date with technologies both older ones and emerging cutting edge stuff. My current interests are mostly in the open-source, UNIX-based programming, machine learning and BigData areas. Some of my favourites include:
- Scala – I’ve written a book about design patterns in it.
- Java
- Spark and the whole infrastructure around it
- NoSQL databases – Cassandra, ScyllaDB, MongoDB
- Scripting Languages – Python, Bash
- Messaging – Kafka, RabbitMQ
- Different web frameworks – mostly Scala and Java-based.
The above list is far from complete in terms of technologies and things I like and do. I like being involved in all levels of application development – from the design, to generating data for it, to actually building and writing an application for users to use it.
Apart from technology, I do lots of sports. My biggest ones are tennis, mountain biking and snowboarding.
The purpose of this site is to share my knowledge with other people. I will try to update it regularly with some interesting tutorials and problems that I had/have to solve in my developing.
I will share my impressions of new technologies, talk about algorithms, etc.
I hope you will enjoy your stay here!
If you’re interested in getting in touch with me, you can always do it via this blog, Github or LinkedIn.
