You need to start with “Hello”.

— James May on flirting

Hello,

My name is Tony Ganchev (Bulgarian: Тони Ганчев, IPA: /ˈtɔni ˈɡant͡ʃɛf/) and I have been entertaining, antagonizing, or mentoring people for the past forty years from my base of operations in Sofia, Bulgaria. The years following 2004 have been particularly focused on my roaming the Bulgarian IT underworld. For fifteen-years up until September of 2025 my gig was with VMware / Broadcom where I ended up as a Senior Staff Engineer and the lead architect for most of the UI of the Cloud Platform Business Unit, later Cloud Infrastructure Business Group, and as the lead for infrastructure UI after the Broadcom acquisition and the mergers that resulted in the VCF division. Most prominent things I led was the vSphere Client – the main tool at the desks of over 500,000 enterprise customers, its plugin architecture, VMware Managed Cloud Console, SDDC Manager and many others. I had the opportunity to innovate, solve complex problems, and mentor great younger architects. Between me and them, we created new industries, and worked with most major enterprise vendors of cloud and datacenter solutions. 6 / 8 patents / applications to my name and more than ten for the team are a testament to our work and success.

Beyond work, I have deep interests in all things product design, software architecture not only in enterprise and cloud software but also in system- and game development, language and compiler design. At some point I definitely need to do some light blogging on the topic of Pupi – my toy OS which I’ve nurtured ever since it was a little Hello world-printing boot sector program).

But I don’t plan to only blog on professional topics as it tends to get boring – both for me and, I’d expect – for any potential reader. Losing most of my awake hours in front of the computer screen I also enjoy the simple pleasures of reading, watching films or my beloved Levski losing, and listening to tons of music. Being a pathological thrash, crossover, and punk enthusiast I also tend to enjoy all things Jamaican and any electronic music that provokes hip swinging. So expect some random bits of musical knowledge dropped from to time to time, as in addition to listening to music I keep on failing at playing it – on guitar, drums, or whatever else I get my hands on.

Trying to stay healthy and sweat all the KFC I consume, I have taken up biking, and weight-lifting, but don’t expect me to blow my whistle too often – I am the only person in the world that never reached a point where he “simply cannot live without sport”. What I’d like to indulge in more often, on the other hand, are stories about my trips to exotic destinations. I have promised myself to work harder in this direction from now on. Having dipped my finger in all of the world oceans, and visited five out of the seven continents there is a lot to remember.

Just when I thought that the blog will turn out to be too unfocused I remembered some other hobbies that I try to have such as playing cooking, painting, calligraphy, Lego, airplane modeling, and refurnishing my apartment so that it accommodates all of these lunacies while trying to not completely piss off my better half.

Should you decide to come in contact, my professional profile is up on LinkedIn, I push code to GitHub, and I take the occasional stab at people on Twitter.

トニー

PS If you wonder about the name of my blog. Gredichki (гредички) and motichki (мотички) are the diminutive plurals of greda (греда) and motika (мотика)- which mean (structural or goal-post) beam and hoe – the agricultural instrument, not Dr. House’s second-favorite past-time – respectively. Why – because both have constant present in the daily life of the unfortunate engineer. To hit the (beam of) the goal post has the same notion as in English, and stepping on a hoe is similar to stepping on a rake – just that the secondary injury is from cutting rather than piercing.