I’m not expecting any readers, so I would be really surprised if you’re reading this. Anyway, hello and welcome. For starters, let me in this post introduce myself and explain what this blog is about.

Intro

My name is Volodymyr Baranchuk, I’m 26 years old. Born and raised in Ukraine. Damn… Why is it always so difficult to write about myself? 🫠

It’s been almost two years since russian army savages invaded Ukraine and started the biggest war in Europe since WW2. Normal life is on pause. I guess I’ve been too focused on my job in these recent years that I’ve forgotten what I truly enjoy. I even had to take a look at my earlier photos to remember how wonderful it was before.

I’m definitely more of an introvert kind of a person and one hundred percent of the time, I will choose to enjoy the silence and beauty of the forest to loud parties. However, it doesn’t mean that I’m a hermit. There are people who I truly love spending time with: closest fiends, family, fiancee.

Sport is also a significant part of my life. Since childhood I’ve been playing football, which instilled in me persistency, self-discipline and understanding of teamwork importance.

Also, I’m a huge fan of worthy movies, series and books, I’ve watched and read plenty of them so far. It’s especially interesting to watch favorite ones in the original language, rather than doubed.

Lately I’ve been devoting more time to professional literature, however, when I have free time on weekends I still love re-watching movies with my fiancee (she missed all of them, now we are trying to catch up 😅).

Since early childhood I absolutely love nature and traveling, be it a barbeque with friends in a forest or hiking in Switzerland mountains. If I didn’t have to work and tickets were free, I would probably visit every single country on the planet.

Сan’t wait until the war is over to return to normal life and feel these inexpressible emotions again.

Experience

Before my 20s, the only thing related to computers I was interested in was online games. Dota, Counter-Strike, Fifa, you name it. Back at the time, the word “programming” evoked boring nerds in my mind. Little did I know that I would become one of these boring nerds in the future 😂

In 2018, while I was studying at university, my friends and I started a little business which required basic knowledge of HTML and regular expressions (if you know what I mean 😅). That was basically the first time when I was introduced to programming.

Shortly after, at the same university I saw a recruitment ad for free PHP courses. Students who successfully finished the course would have a chance to join the company. I was among them and this is how I landed my first job at SoftGroup.

I remember this company with warmth in my soul. Vibrant office, friendly and supportive colleagues, and first steps in programming. Golden years 🥹

Moreover, two month after being hired, my fellow Alex and I were chosen for a foreign project from Germany. I had an opportunity to spend a week in Dusseldorf, meet our stakeholders and get to know our foreign colleagues.

After having wokred there for a little less than one and a half year, it was to move on.

In 2020, I joined Quintagroup company from Lviv. Unfortunately, I don’t have much to share from that period of my career. That was a remote position during Covid. However, I had a few quite interesting projects there. After 8 months I decided to quit and take a break for a few month to recharge mentally and physically.

In the fall of 2021 I got hired as a Middle Web UI Engineer by SoftServe. The second biggest tech company in Ukraine. Even though there are two comfortable offices in my city, for the most part the job is remote here as well, so I don’t have any office stories or photos. Ever since I joined the company, I’ve been working on a huge healthcare project. I’ve met a lot of good managers and experienced developers.

By the way, here’s a picture of what my workspace looked like last year:

Blog name

Once I decided to create a blog, this name almost instantly came to my mind.

Code, which is the first part of the name, is pretty obvious. Everything in programming revolves around code, be it a simple YAML configuration file or a huge enterprise application written in C++.

The second part, Smuzi, is less obvious. It’s a Ukrainian transliteration of the word “smoothie”. Why smoothie? Because this blog is unlikely to have any structure or a specific target. I’m not gonna focus on a particular programming language, framework or tool. I’m trying to become more versatile in different aspects of development. Therefore, my blog will probably resemble a smoothie with random set of ingridients.

By the way, “smooth” is a perfect word to describe how your code should work 😅

The idea behind this blog

So, who is this blog written for? First of all, for me.

I don’t even think there will be a single visitor other than myself.

In the recent years I’ve been reading lots of articles, books, watching programming courses and other learning materials. Not everything I could apply on my daily job activities, especially when it comes to purely conceptual or theoretical topics. As a result, I’ve noticed that as time passes, a great deal of information just flies out of the memory.

I believe that writing something and explaining it to others (especially in your own words) helps to understand a topic more deeply and move it from short-term to long-term memory. Besides, even if I forget something, there will be a place to come back and revisit it again.

There is even a saying in Ukrainian (most likely it also exists in English, but I haven’t found it):

I’ve explained it to you so many times that I finally figured it out for myself.

Apart from that, I also have a few secondary goals to achieve:

1. Learning English. I strongly believe that writing in a foreign language is a great way to master the language and dramatically expand your vocabulary.
2. Supplement to my resume. Personal blog helps recruiters to evaluate future employee’s knowledge and area of interests.
3. New skill. Writing a blog is a great way to leave a comfort zone and learn something new.
4. Self-discipline. Blogging requires a considerable amount of time, efforts and self-discipline. I’m planning to write a post weekly, I doubt I’ll keep this promise though 😅

In addition to all the above, I sincerely hope that some day at least one passerby will find something useful here.

P.S. As you’ve probably already got, English is not my native language, so don’t be too harsh.

Thanks for reading the article. I hope it was bearable 😅 Should you have any thoughts, corrections and suggestions, please leave your comment in the comments section below.