Hello World

Hi and welcome! I’m Peter, mostly known online as solnic. I’m a software engineer who’s trying to get back to blogging and screencasting. Let’s go!

If you’ve no idea who I am, here’s a brief introduction!

Programming and Open Source

I’ve been doing the whole software engineering professionally for roughly 17 years now. It all started when I was still a Computer Science student but once I realized I can already create and get paid, well, I didn’t wait and use the first opportunity to do just that. I started with a classic stack back then which was called LAMP - Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP (and I kid you not I just googled what “M” stands for haha). I quickly transitioned from a full-time student to a full-time employee at a local tech company and a part-time student. I was really eager to learn on my own more than to follow the curriculum.

I eventually graduated with a Bachelor degree in Computer Science and my thesis was about Ruby on Rails (yes!) - this strange new web framework written in Ruby. This was back in 2008 and by that time I was already working as a Ruby developer because I stopped enjoying PHP after working with it for about 2 years.

While working with Ruby professionally, I’ve become a very active member of the Open Source community, Ruby community specifically. I joined the DataMapper Core Team in 2010, created a (still?) popular Ruby gem called Virtus in 2011, then started working on Ruby Object Mapper (rom-rb) project in 2013, and then helped establish dry-rb project in 2015. All of this work has taught me a lot and also - it was a lot of work.

In fact, I’ve done so much that the Ruby community recognized this and nominated me for the Ruby Prize in 2017. I’ve become one of the final nominees and I was invited to Matsue in Japan to receive the prize from Matz himself. I’m very grateful for this amazing experience!

I continued my Open Source work and eventually started collaborating with the Hanami team. We eventually decided to join forces as our ideas and values were very much aligned. The culmination of this collaboration was the recent release of Hanami 2.0 and now we are focused on shipping Hanami 2.1 in Q1 2023.

CW: mental health & ADHD

Even though everything that I wrote so far sounds like an amazing fairy tale, there’s a somewhat gloomy background there. I’ve been struggling with mental health issues my entire life and things got pretty bad over time. I started seeking professional help in 2017 and after years of therapy I was eventually diagnosed with ADHD in 2021.

If you’re wondering why I’m even writing about this here the reason is quite simple - I promised myself to be loud about it. It’s not easy but I want to do it because I know it can help others and it also helps me. This sounds like a win-win situation, doesn’t it?

My struggles had a huge impact on what I did and how I did it. In fact, I’m pretty sure a lot of my Open Source contributions were fueled by my issues as I was seeking escape and using programming as a coping mechanism. This was a fun realization.

These days I’m doing my best to live a better life and be more healthy and balanced. It’s an every day challenge but I already know that things can get better, so I continue this journey.

What to expect

I want to create content mostly about programming and somehow blend this with telling you my story. What I do, how I work, what I do well, what I struggle with and so on. I want to have a conversation. I’d love if people could learn something from me while simultaneously I’d love to learn from people too.

My content is typically following whatever I’m currently doing either at work or in the Open Source world. To be more specific, here are some topics that I’ll be covering here in no particular order:

• Elixir - I’ve been working professionally with Elixir since April 2022 and I love it. Sharing my experiences here could be potentially interesting.
• Hanami / dry-rb / rom-rb - all the Ruby projects that I’m working on and everything that’s related.
• Programming paradigms and patterns
• TESTING, especially BDD
• Healthy productivity - how I manage to work as a programmer despite having ADHD. This can get both technical and detailed and maybe it’s not going to be for everybody but I want to at least give this topic a shot.
• Anything that you would like me to write or talk about 🙂

For now everything is going to be free. I’m not yet sure how I feel about the paywall option but I may consider using it instead of GitHub Sponsors as a way to support my Open Source work.

If there are any specific topics you’d like me to touch soon - feel free to leave a comment with suggestions.

OK let’s do this! Byeeee.