*The Personal Statement* (last modified: 12/20/2005, 16:23 EET)

	I was not very popular in school in my early years. When my peers went to discos with girls, I
	stayed at home with my parents. In class when teachers examined me, I often made stupid
	mistakes due to my shyness, while the most popular kids intentionally said stupid
	things to look cool.

	Unexpectedly I broke up the pattern in grade 8, when I got interested in computers. I came across
	an Internet service allowing you to create your own Web site. At that time I knew about
	computers no more than a regular school kid.

	Initially I was just curious. I'd never imagined that I could create a Web site. I just scribbled HTML
	(the language in which Web pages are written) in an arbitrary way copying from somewhere and
	pasting it, deleting it, editing it. In the beginning I didn't even know that this was called HTML, but
	when I read it somewhere I asked my mother to buy me a book about it. Upon learning the
	fundamentals of the Web site design, I wanted to create much more advanced sites. In a few
	months I learned enough HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create
	an almost professionally looking site.

	As my site grew larger and larger, I realized that I needed software that would allow me to
	incorporate new pages to it with less effort. I found out that such a system can be created with a
	language called PHP. I thought that it would be very difficult to learn it because until that time I
	hadn't done any real programming, but I managed to learn the basis of PHP in less than a month.
	(Have you noticed that when you try to learn something, you can learn very easily
	when you have some specific task you want to accomplish?)

	When my Web design skills finally reached the level of a professional, I got bored. I had to do
	something else. One day I read an article about a university student who had written some
	successful Windows programs in a language called Visual Basic. I got interested and learned this
	new language. But now what? I had to start a new project to utilize the knowledge.

	Meanwhile I saw an interesting program that was the only one of its kind. Not any longer though, I
	thought. Created by a big multinational corporation, X-Setup for a long time had been the
	predominant power among Windows-tweaking programs. I decided to create a better one.

	Now my program, called TweakFX, is X-Setup's major competitor. The program continually grew from
	a very simple application. But it took me years to develop it (and even now I have new things I
	want to do). It took me years to lure away some of the X-Setup users, but I did it because I
	implemented almost every new feature requested by the users.

	In the beginning of 2004 some other people and I started BGDevelopment (www.bgdev.org). We
	hadn't planned to create the largest IT developers community in Bulgaria, but it grew to become
	that. Now it is a discussion board and home for more than 2500 people. (Since the middle of 2005,
	I'm temporarily out of the administration team. I had to study for SATs.)

	Creating BGDev gave me things I could never obtain from another place. Of course it took a lot of
	programming and designing, but this is not as interesting as the other parts: team work, meeting
	smart people, looking for advertisers, even the numerous arguments about silly things inside the
	team. These are all precious things you can learn and feel neither in a lab, nor in a school. Working
	on real projects that solve real problems in the real world, as I've always thought, is the best school.

	One day someone posted links to two Web sites with essays – sites I later on found invaluable, both
	as a human being and as a computer programmer. The first site was of the CEO of Dexterity
	Software, Steve Pavlina. His essays helped me gain self-confidence and throw out the fear
	of starting something new. The other site was of the dotcom millionaire Paul Graham. He writes
	mostly on computer-related topics and this helped me fall in love with computers even more. And
	start to feel that Computer Science is my raison d'etre.

	Now I don't want to be popular. Or at least I don't want my popularity to be measured by going to
	discos with girls and saying stupid things. I realized that previously I probably felt I was a loser
	because I had nothing to be passionate about.


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