Once, I visited an open day at a company. The speaker was my future colleague Anton B. Speaking to students, he began by telling how he became a programmer. From the first words of his speech, I started to experience déjà vu.
- Also not a typical IT professional.
- Also graduated from SGAU (State Agricultural University).
- Also from the second faculty.
- Also taught students the finite element method.
- Also didn’t get accepted into graduate school.
- Also didn’t manage to work in his profession.
- Also quickly mastered a programming language because he needed to perform one specific task (sort of, without any courses).
Those who have taken courses and are counting on working in IT are called ‘vkatsy’ with a negative connotation (Dim, thanks for the word).
I got excited and time went by. Now Anton is moving further along, I am promoting ideas instead of him.
Today I will talk about my story with graduate school.
Volkov Commander
From the third course, I worked as a lab assistant at my department, and later as an engineer. The laboratory was less involved in DВС (Internal Combustion Engine) engines, but more in two computer classes.
I got my first computer towards the end of the second course, and before that, I didn’t know how to properly turn off a PC. There were AT power supplies that required you to unplug them after the orange inscription “Now the computer’s power can be turned off” appeared on the screen.
And I passed my programming exam with this meager knowledge base. The task was in Delphi to create an application for solving a system of equations – finding the intersection points of a line and a parabola.
I didn’t have a computer, and I came to the classroom during free time. I only mastered construction types like StrToFloat() 
There wasn’t enough time to study, and I wasn’t ready for programming or mechanical engineering and thermal technology back then. I gathered all possible options from my classmates and found the most similar one. I studied it, but it was useless.
In two days before the exam, a friend showed me a floppy disk formatted at 1.54 MB (instead of the standard 1.38 – please correct me) and it could hold VC Volkov Commander. A two-pane manager with built-in hex editor. In it, I fixed the exe-file by changing the surname on the form, and went for the exam. In everything else, the program suited me, you could set the equation coefficients there – they weren’t hardcoded.
The teacher was a kind woman, she saw the error. The second intersection point of the line with the parabola exited the screen. She looked at the result disapprovingly and opened the floppy disk.
- Well, what did you do about it? You have the source code here.
I quickly fixed the fields and recompiled the program. The surname returned to its original form. She didn’t notice my trick, but I decided to confess to her. I told her everything that had happened.
She says:
- It’s “four”.
I ran home as fast as I could and told my parents that this couldn’t continue. I needed a computer. Especially since they promised to cancel the pencil sketches of blueprints. I spent the summer learning Delphi and wrote a program that helped me do homework and theses.
Linux
Quite quickly, I became interested in Linux and wrote a fix for the DVB-card driver, through which friends received satellite internet. We built a router on a Pentium II with a floppy disk instead of a hard drive, buried it in cement, and connected two networks. One megabit was shared among several people. A torrent server ran locally.
That knowledge was enough for me to get a job at the first IT company, but not before. By then, I had been working as a caretaker in a pharmacy and later as a mechanic at a factory in a machine-building plant, while remaining on my department’s staff and teaching students.
In the university, there were two computer classes, where Squid proxy and email ran, for which the university administrator never wanted to register a third-level domain. Instead, he was happy that each of the 12 computers in the classroom had a white IP address before entering the proxy, and Trojans walked between the computers.
A cluster MPI was set up on the basis of several computers for parallel calculations of combustion.
Graduate School
Meanwhile, the future candidate of technical sciences, Belobayev, came to print his dissertation. The topic seemed interesting to him – he was improving the combustion chamber of the NK-36ST engine for reducing emissions. This is an engine for gas pumping stations.
He taught me how to use Fluent, in which he calculated his model. He told me that he had developed UDFs (User Defined Functions) specifically to accurately calculate combustion. The principle of operation was to simulate a cross-section of the combustion chamber (2D) with boundary conditions imposed on the inlet and outlet. On the left – airflow from the compressor + gas from the burners, along the outer side – an additional layer of air for protecting the chamber, and on the right – output to the first stage of the turbine (there are no pictures).
The cells were divided, and equations of fluid and gas flow were applied to them. All this was supposed to ignite and show a picture of combustion.
As it turned out later, it was quite different.
I refused from the suggested topic, so I wasn’t needed by anyone with my combustion, and by that time Belobayev had already defended his dissertation based on which future doctors were planned. Everything was scheduled according to plan. But there was one “but”. It consisted in the fact that his model diverged from the tested design. He Heathrow closed: flight disruption expected to continue in coming days, says London airport management