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Here is my speech to the graduating class of Plovdiv University Faculty of Math and Informatics:

A few years ago, I started teaching programming at Plovdiv University. The course is about writing games in C++ using unreal engine. I wanted to come up with a fun way to teach programming because when I learned to program, everything was just in a text editor. So I put together a course where we go over the standard programming concepts while building a game.

Also, I heard somewhere that students remember 10% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, and 90% of what they do. So we are heavy on the doing and light on the lecturing.

On 14th of December I was honored with the special award “Strategic Investor in Plovdiv Region for 2017” at a discussion meeting with representatives from the Municipality of Plovdiv. The award was based on the investments and work I have been doing in the software industry.

The prize was given by the mayor of Plovdiv eng. Ivan Totev. “This year has been very successful for Plovdiv, with a lot of investments made by the local business”, said Totev.

The organizers of the event aimed to show the economic progress of the region, to take stock of the passing year and to discuss the perspectives and challenges of 2018.

I was really happy when I found out that some of the open source work I did ended up going into the latest SuperTuxKart build.  I release just about all of my open source work under a CC0 license, which doesn’t require crediting me, but they gave me the credit anyway.  And it really felt great. Thank you guys.  I am proud to have my name is in the credits of one of my favorite games.    Link:  https://sourceforge.net/p/supertuxkart/mailman/supertuxkart-commit/?limit=250&viewmonth=201707&style=flat

If you don’t know what SuperTuxKart is, it is a racing game that constantly ranks among the best open source projects of all time.  And not only did I make it to the credits, You can see also the part I worked on near the grand finale of the trailer video.  My stuff starts at about 1:29 mark.

 

 

You can download the game over here.  https://supertuxkart.net/Download  It is totally free and it is really a lot of fun.

Here is a screenshot where you can see the part of my work which was included.  It is the big hulking statue holding the lightpost.  And of course you are welcome to grab a free copy from opengameart and use it in any of your projects.

Thank you everyone at the SuperTuxKart team, I am truly honored.