Google Award / Location / English

[damassi]

1. How has winning the Grand Prize award from Google influenced your development as a programmer? You're already so young, and was quite a while ago...
2. Have you ever considered relocating outside of Russia? It seems like the world could be your oyster (in terms of employment / travel opportunities) with so many successful open source projects under your belt in such a short period of time. (Edit, saw that you are in the process of moving to London -- why there?)
3. Also curious about your mastery of the English language. Did you grow up with a parent who was a native speaker? Or perhaps only later in life move to Russia? Your written fluency is quite impressive, and the quality of your docs seem to shine in this fact.

[gaearon]

How has winning the Grand Prize award from Google influenced your development as a programmer? You're already so young, and was quite a while ago...

It was definitely a formative experience for me. I learned that I won't be judged (at least not in my face) on where I'm from as long as I produce quality code. I learned that understanding existing APIs and writing code within the project's conventions in the least surprising manner is often more valuable than technical cleverness, so me being undereducated is not such a big problem as I thought.

Have you ever considered relocating outside of Russia? It seems like the world could be your oyster (in terms of employment / travel opportunities) with so many successful open source projects under your belt in such a short period of time. (Edit, saw that you are in the process of moving to London -- why there?)

I'm moving to London because I'm likely to get a full-time job in a company there soon.

Also curious about your mastery of the English language. Did you grow up with a parent who was a native speaker? Or perhaps only later in life move to Russia? Your written fluency is quite impressive, and the quality of your docs seem to shine in this fact.

No, nothing like that :-). I had some English in school, and then I had a good private teacher. I also read a ton of documentation and articles since being 13 years old (MSDN, later programming blogs like Joel on Software).

I would often learn words without knowing how to pronounce them, as I was mostly reading and not speaking/listening. For example, I would pronounce “public event” (Visual Basic syntax) as 'poob-lic 'eh-vent because that's how you'd read it with Russian pronunciation. School helped with that.

The biggest breakthrough for me was when I read a fake Harry Potter book. I was in the country, waiting anxiously for Harry Potter 5 to be released. One day I saw a book claiming to be a leak (in English) on a Russian file exchange. I downloaded it, and started to read it despite having difficulties with grammar and words. I'd just skip the stuff I didn't understand. Eventually, by the fifth chapter, I have internalized enough idioms, words and grammar constructs to finally understand what's going on. It's only then that I realized the book was fake and was actually fan fiction disguised as a leak. I finished it anyway, though it was pretty ridiculous. Later, I read all real Harry Potter books in English, and this really helped me with the language.

[damassi]

Wow, that fake Harry Potter story is great! Thanks so much for the response and keep doing the good work 👍