This 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.
Tatiana Ovchinnikova (nee Mazur) was a mathematician fond of coding. One day she got bored, and turned into a coder fond of maths. She has focused her efforts on Horizon, the OpenStack web dashboard, and now she is a member of the core team. She hopes that she will make Horizon even better than it already is.
In 20 years OpenStack will be used to power every device, big or small, from cell phones to microwave ovens. Just because it will be so perfect and lightweight that everyone will want to use it. As for 50 years, I believe that at some point before that OpenStack will contact us to discuss our future collaboration.
2. How did you learn to code? Are you self-taught or did you learn in college? On-the-job?
I’m a proud self-taught. All has begun with programs to help with everyday activity: for counting Star Date, for EEG processing and visualisation and other small and fun projects. Later I realized that there are a lot of complex problems yet to be solved and there is a plenty of room beyond small hobby programs to apply good coding skills.
3. Define what “open source” means to you.
Open source is an endless library of good and bad examples of coding styles, manners of thinking and communicating ideas. It’s up to you only which way and side to choose, when and how to develop your expertise. Also it is a huge collection of extremely useful and easily customizable tools for everyday work.
4. If you couldn’t be a developer, what would your dream job be?
That is a tough question. I can come up with several dream jobs and it is not so easy to pick one. First of all, I could be an interpreter, this time not from human language to code, but for example from French to Klingon or to Toki Pona. Or to depart from interpretation completely and be a monk in Tiger Temple (tigers are awesome).
5. Vulcan or Romulan?
Kling akhlami buhfik.
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