In pursuit of what I love, or how I ended up in Belgium

Each of us has our own dreams, goals, hobbies (and there is work). Sometimes all these things coincide, sometimes they coexist, and sometimes they diverge altogether. I was very lucky and, in fact, I was able to combine them and find my dream job, which perfectly combined dreams and hobbies.

This post was inspired by two of today's habrasties, namely “How I left to work as an IT specialist in London” and “About the love of programming languages” , because it was the love of the programming language, combined with my two main hobbies, that threw me into the unofficial capital of the European Union.

Introduction


Since childhood, I was interested in two things: aviation and computer technology.

Let's start with a short autobiography, my father is a military pilot, I spent all my childhood in military towns, falling asleep and waking up to the roar of jet engines, as a student for the first time I jumped out of a serviceable helicopter with a piece of cloth, personally put into a satchel and called a D-1 parachute -5u. This did not pass without a trace and I fell in love with aviation with all my heart, so there was no doubt about the choice of a profession. Having received a higher aviation engineering education, I even flew a little as an on-board aircraft technician of a ship (a plane weighing more than 40 tons is called a “ship” in the Air Force), but at the same time I did not give up a second hobby: during training, a disk from Mandrake was excavated studied button poking in Borland C ++ Builder for writing labs (I cannot call this programming),

And I fly hunting


But I was not destined to become a general of the Air Force - fate decreed otherwise, and I left the ranks of the Armed Forces. Then there was a career as a Linux engineer in various Russian and international companies, but it always attracted to airplanes, spent hours under the glide path of nearby airports, in simulators and at air forums, I loved business trips only because of flights, and I always carried the “right” GPS with me Navigator, which had the "Flight" mode to monitor the change of echelons and airways.

Of course, I constantly monitored vacancies and possible development paths in civil aviation. Aircraft technician - yes, but computers there at the level of “L lamp turned on - change block B”, but in winter and summer on concrete, and you had to ask for money for retraining, but I really didn’t want to fall into bondage to the employer, self-taught , we need certificates, and the salary made me cry for the domestic aviation industry. Of the interesting things, for example, was the vacancy of an engineer for a simulator at S7 Training, but at that time I had neither rights nor a car, and they offered a salary that was not very high for shift work 50 km from the house they paid less than admin a couple of servers.

At some point it dawned on me - but after all, software for aviation is also written and made by ordinary people, not Gods burn pots, but what is the most “aviation” programming language? That's right, Ada! By that time I already knew at least poorly hell - the apartment's neighbor praised me this “beautiful language without buffer overflows” and gradually I began to get involved in the community (yes, there is a community, including in Russia),

On the way to your goal


The next task arose - to find a list of potential employers, their requirements and, if possible, to “light up” in these circles.
The search even for potential employers in Russia did not give any results; there are companies that develop software in this area, but they either do not recruit, or in the requirements of “expert C (++)”, or even more fun than ASM, but the foreign world has shown that not everything is so bad: EADS, Boeing, several French near-airbus companies use Ada in their development quite often, and even vacancies periodically appear; well, in general, a dozen companies were recruited (to the whole world!). There was one problem - they didn’t want to take from Russia (and, as we will see later, it’s not about visa problems at all). And here the decision came so popular lately - it's time to bring down.

Emigration


The search for possible emigration did not take much time - one well-known red-handed company agreed to provide me with an old rusty tractor, because people in support, even if they are of the third line, are always needed. No, it wasn’t so simple and smooth, but still it wasn’t particularly difficult either. Three telephone interviews - Job Offer - 3 months of paper work and type D visas (long-term) are pasted in the passports, the process of emigration to the Czech Republic is described in great detail on the Internet, I will not stop here. All the belongings are sold out, the remains are piled up in the beloved Prius on the night of December 25 (with a delicate look at the good customs officers who will not be interested in a car littered with belongings from the backs of the front seats to the trunk lid, and the absence of queues at Christmas),

Flare


The next step, as you remember, was to “light up” in “hellish” circles, and, at the same time, learn a language. Since at that time I used Fedora Linux as the main distribution, it was logical to create a development environment for this distribution, to package libraries, fix errors and other routine-bureaucratic work, well, while writing something for myself and helping others. In Debian Linux, by the way, the same work is done by Ludovic Brenta - my current colleague (but I did not know where he works until the moment of signing the contract).

I was noticed


And finally, that long-awaited moment has come: I get a message on Linkedin from a recruiter of one of the consulting companies: “I’m looking for a Junior Software Engineer to work with one of our clients in the field of Air Traffic Control Management in Brussels”. Three telephone interviews:

  • Actually HR, general questions
  • The project manager on the part of the consulting company - Java / C ++ programmer - questions on patterns, problems of parallel programming and a brief excursion into how to behave in an interview
  • (As it turned out) The current team lead. Questions about building complex, distributed systems, questions about problems with working with memory (everything is simple - Philip is one of the key developers of valgrind), about bind, connect, SQL, find / grep / sed, etc. ... I was most struck by the question: “How many lines of code have you written?”, Even now, after two months of work, I don’t remember how many lines of code I wrote on this particular project.
  • Web testing for the presence in the brain of the compiler of the language knowledge of the Ada language. Then I cheated a little - in the test, when I pressed the Ctrl button, a “deuce” was automatically set (so that they would not copy the text and check how the compiler behaved) ... Linux users have already guessed what the trick was, right? Nevertheless, not all tests could be stupidly copied and checked, and it was necessary to type at least 80% of the correct answers, and I already thought that my interviews were running short on this
  • A face-to-face interview that coincided with my presentation on FOSDEM on the topic “Ada in Fedora Linux” (the presentation can be found on SlideShare, the presentation itself should be somewhere on the Internet). The tasks of “writing a code on a piece of paper”: “Find and Replace”, “rotating the outer border of the matrix”, calculating the time spent on climbing in various atmospheric conditions and some other ... In general, 6 hours of hell (I don’t even know from what root Hell or Hell) torment after the flight and 14 hours on the feet. And the provocative question about the frequent change of work ...


The first question was, of course, “Your citizenship?”, Because my “international” resume was confusing, the answer “Russia” upset them at first, but during the second interview something like: “We found out, the work permit will be it takes 2 months, you don’t need a visa, it suits us ”, my friend, who had“ Russia ”in the resume, did not even begin to interview me, I don’t know the reasons, alas. Well, it’s worth mentioning that the work permit was ready before my term of “working out” in the Czech Republic ended,
And here it is - the long-awaited Job Offer! Since May 1st, I am a programmer in the development team of the Enhanced Tactical Flow Management Systemat Eurocontrol. (Well, actually, not in Eurocontrol itself, since all development has been given to a subcontract). The system is really complex and is responsible for Flow and Capacity Management over the entire territory of the single airspace of the member countries:

image

It counts more than 2 million lines of code, and at the same time it underwent several cardinal changes over its almost 20-year history (and this is not the limit, because individual components were written in 1986), during which very interesting problems of scalability, reliability and once again reliability were solved, but more about that in future releases!

This way you can not talk about your favorite and “working” programming languages, but make a worker out of your favorite, no matter how exotic or extinct it may seem. And yes, dreams come truenot only in the advertising of the gas giant, it is worthwhile to make only a little effort, diluted with a bit of luck.

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