Have you learned something new or interesting lately?

I constantly learn something new because I read a lot of tech blogs, books, participate in several user/dev mail lists and QA websites. It's my habit.

I have doubts if all this information is useful but it keeps me up.

Why did you get into coding, programming, etc?

There are no many choices in a place there I lived if you are a mathematician by education ))

I accepted an opportunity to become a software developer during my master program at the university. At that time my future manager looked for mathematicians ready to join his team.

It worth to mention that I have passion to digital electronics, programed Soviet calculator MK-61 during childhood, learned dialect of BASIC solely via books reading without access to PC and had a dream to build my own computer from discrete components.

What is your preferred development environment?

Of course I like documented, consistent and simple instruments.

I worked with many proprietary platforms. Job should be done despite any inconveniences and dumbness of development kit.

Hopefully nowadays modern IDEs and Internet search allow you to work even with bloated, buggy, and inconsistent platforms without dwelling in debugger all days long.

What is the coolest thing you ever coded?

A small function that checks 4-bit permutation table for correctness. I filled 16-bit word with offsets in a table and unless it is equal to 0xff the table is broken.

A set of macros that implements fast multiplication of 256-bit GF(2^n) polynomials by Karatsuba's method from 16-bit multiplication primitives. It took three hours to code and was correct from the first run.

Do you have any personal projects you are working on?

Several. Including this blog ))