People sometimes ask how come I know so much about Oracle (and some Unix) internals and how do I have such a passion for these things.
Also, another thing you may have noticed is that for some reason a large amount of hardcore computer hackers, low level troubleshooters and various internals experts happen to come from Russia.
And I can answer why this is so!
A little bit of history: I am an Estonian, was born in Estonia and lived over 20 of my first years there. From 1940 to 1991 Estonia was occupied by Soviet Union (excluding a few years during World War II when we were occupied by German forces).
So, as I was born in the end of ’70s, for the most of my childhood we were still under Soviet Union. And that applies to all Russians and other nationalities in that empire too.
- …This meant that all we could buy was Soviet Union products.
- …And all these products usually had quality issues.
- …Which meant that whenever I got some toy as a present for Christmas or my birthday - I first had to FIX it and only then I could play with it! :-)
- …That usually applied to toy cars, constructors and whatever non-trivial pieces of toys. Some things needed minor tweaking, some required complete disassembly and reassembly, sometimes you needed to improvise and come up with the missing pieces yourself!
- …Later on it also applied to bikes etc. The bike could be working in principle but you still needed to tune it to get it running smoothly - and to make sure that it wouldn’t break down when you went downhill the max speed you could get.
So, I ended up getting something good out of something bad - I had to learn troubleshooting since I was a little kid! ;-)
