About Me
The most frequent question people ask about my blog is why do I call my blog "Roumen's weblog" if your name is "Roman"? They used to call me "Roumen" at gymnasium (european type of high school) - it's a game with words. Roumen happens if you write "Roman" in Czech and then pronounce it in English and write this pronounciation in Czech again. I am sure you understand now :)
I'm 27 years old now and ever since I was a child I wanted to become a software engineer. I was inspired by my father who was a chief of the computing group in one of the small rural organisations during era of communism in Czech republic. I got fascinated by all that stuff and became geek already at my age of 6 when I got my first microcomputer.
The rest of the story is probably similar to yours, I met Commodores, PCs, started to write software, played a lot of games... instead of going to the pub or chasing girls I kept investigating the deep secrets of computers which during became my biggest hobby and my job as well.
After graduation I went to Czech Technical University where I met lots of interesting people, among a young enterpreneur who at the age of 19 founded a company called Zoom International. I worked there for 5 years, it was a great experience. I did there almost everything - starting by hardware, networks, Linux, security, Cisco IP telephony, web applications, intranets, a J2EE application (which was a disaster), lots of PHP programming, project management and a bit of people management.
In 2005 I came to the conclusion, that I could use a change. So by coincidence - I just clicked on an innocent banner - I tried Sun because Sun seemed to be an interesting place mainly due to the large team of developers. I've been doing software quality engineering for one year at Sun and then I moved to the evangelism team. Nowadays I fly around the world and speak at Java conferences. I enjoy exchanging thoughts with software engineers all around the world and am very enthusiastic about the ever-evolving technologies around Java. Next to blogging and recording my own podcast I do all kinds of things which help promote NetBeans, like writing articles, recording flash demos, interviewing people and so on. My mission is to help people learn to use NetBeans and find out how it can help them become more productive when they write their software.
I also have a personal life - might be surprising for some of the people who know me shortly. I like a lot sports like squash, biking, running, roller-skating, skiing, swimming, etc. I'm a fanatic into movies and music, I'm able to go 10 times a week to a cinema if there's a festival or to spend 4 days on a music festival. I also spend some of my time by playing computer games (you guessed it) - currently I am addicted to The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I don't like cooking but I love eating and drinking - I'm like a hobbit in this, I could eat and drink the whole day. I enjoy desk games, I used to play a lot of Magic the Gathering and AD&D, nowadays I enjoy card games. I like to read a lot, next to technical books I read sci-fi or fantasy books or sometimes even some normal literature. I love sun (with small S :-), the sea, mountains and travelling through Europe, although there's never enough time for this. Four weeks for vacation is just not enough.
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