Open Mic Spotlight: Pavlo Shcelokovskky

pavlov_headshotThis post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful. Each week, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun. If you’re interested in being featured, please choose five questions from this form and submit!

Having made science in Europe for 12 years (theoretical solid state physics and experimental biophysics), Pavlo Shcelokovskky returned back home to the Ukraine and switched to full-time programming. Currently, he is a software engineer at Mirantis Inc. and for the last six months he has been mostly involved in the OpenStack Orchestration program. Follow him on Twitter @pshchelo

1. How would you explain your job to your grandmother?

To my parents I say that I do stuff that makes things like Dropbox (that they know and use) possible.

2. How did you learn to code? Are you self-taught or did you lear in college? On-the-job?

Self-taught, mostly. There were some programming courses back in school and University (in Pascal), and I backed up my theoretical research during my PhD with some FORTRAN programming. Six years ago I started to learn and use Python in my research, and that is the love story going ever since. 🙂

3. What does “open source” mean to you?

As I come from science, I have a special attitude for “open source”. Openness is what really enables scientific progress by letting you build upon work of others and “stand on the giants’ shoulders”. Only recently, the scientific community started to understand that the code they use and produce is also science, and that it needs to be public as well as the research itself. I am proud to be part of a world-wide scale open source project now.

4. What do you think is the single most important factor for the success of OpenStack users in 2014?

Sahara. Big Data, for better or worse, is the word of the decade, and providing an integration between big data’s stable horse Hadoop and OpenStack will surely draw in more customers and adopters.

5. Where is your favorite place to code? In the office, at a local coffee shop, in bed?

My home is usually a busy and loud place. 🙂 That’s why I prefer to write code in the office.

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