About

This web site is a place for expressing random thoughts and professional experiences of Olexandr Melnyk, a 22-year-old flower kid from Ukraine.

Below is a concise categorized description of his personality.

Location

Since my birth I have been living in Lviv (also known as L’viv, Lvov, Lwów and Lemberg), a medium-sized city with 735,000 inhabitants. The historic centre of Lviv is on the UNESCO World Heritage List and it is a rather green city compared to other Ukrainian regional centers.

Religion

I am a Christian and a follower of the priciple of ahimsa. In practice this means that animals are my friends, not food.

Politics

I am a libertarian, pragmatic anarcho-pacifist and green, but not a member of any political party. I highly adore Mahatma Gandhi and Thích Quảng Đức.

Linguistics

I am an avid (but not yet fluent) Esperantist and can speak Spanish at an intermediate level. My mother tongue is Ukrainian, but I’ve been bilingual since early childhood (the second language is Russian).

Programming

I am mostly interested in open source technologies and my main experience lies in the fields of databases (specifically performance optimization) and web development. For more information about my past works, check out the projects page.

I successfully completed the Google Summer of Code program in 2009, where my mentoring organization was the Mono project.

Formal education

I hold a Bachelor’s degree with honors in Computer Science from Lviv Polytechnic, and am currently enrolled in a Master’s program.

Science

Back when I was in school, I participated in a number of contests and science fairs in computer science, mathematics, physics and astronomy.

Three times so far I made my way to the national programming finals: once as a high school senior and twice in a university team.

Sports

I practiced judo for roughly five years when I was in school, and have a yellow belt. For the past several years, I’ve been enjoying gymnastic exercises and jogging regularly, and completed a half marathon run on August 1, 2006 with a time of 1:56:41.

Traveling

Apart from completing GSoC, in the summer of 2009, I took a hitchhiking trip of approximately 2000km across Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic on my way to Esperanto meetings, and eventually back home.

Apart from that I’ve been to Austria, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova and two breakaway states (Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria).