Welcome to the September Programmer of the Month edition!

This month we have with us Dmytro Dzhulgakov who is our Programmer of the Month. Dmytro has been part of CodeChef since February 2010 and is ranked 48th in the long contest and 3rd in the short contest format. We hope to see this bright young mind achieve his dreams. On behalf of the CodeChef team, we wish him good luck for the future.  Now let’s see what Dmytro has to tell us about himself.

Name: Dmytro Dzhulgakov
Age: 21
Institute: National Technical University “Kharkov Polytechnic Institute”
User id: dzhulgakov

Brief introduction about yourself:

I live in Kharkiv, one of the main educational and scientific centers in Ukraine. Currently I’m studying towards Master degree in Applied Mathematics at National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute”. This degree offers a great mix of math, algorithms theory, and practical programming – so it suits me perfectly. Last year I’ve done two internships in Google and Facebook.

How/When did you start programming?

I was obsessed with Lego as a child – I think that’s probably how I became interested in engineering and computers. I wrote my first program in Assembler at the age of 8 for the Intel 8080 chip. Then I switched to Pascal and Delphi and began exploring the beautiful world of algorithms. I started picking up C++ when I was 16. Since then I’ve been participating in dozens of programming competitions. Also I had an opportunity to take part in industrial computer software development. By the way, one of the products I took part in is running at Kaiga atomic power station

What do you do when you’re not programming?

I travel and photograph, solve math puzzles and wonder what I’ll code next.

What do you like most about CodeChef?

Long contests format that offer really tough problems, problems that hard are not usually proposed on traditional contests. And, of course, CodeChef is a great opportunity to win a lot of T-shirts and stop buying them on my own.

How many hours a day do you program?

It’s really unpredictable and can vary in range 0-24

If you could eat dinner with any famous person (past or present), who would it be and what dish would you have?

I don’t have any strong preference, but it would be really interesting to meet Edsger W. Dijkstra and Richard Stallman.

What is the secret to being a good programmer?

Good math background and a lot of hard work. But the key thing is to be really passionate about what you are doing.

What are your plans for the future?

I’m completing my Masters soon and I’m going to work for Facebook afterwards.

Cheers!
Team CodeChef