My name is Tamas Cservenak. I was born on third. February 1975 in Subotica, Yugoslavia, but I spent my childhood in Backa Topola (30km south from Subotica). I finished here the "Nikola Tesla" grade school and "Dositej Obradovic" high school, both with an excellent mark. My next stop was Novi Sad, Faculty of Natural Science and Mathematics, subject Computer Science. Currently, I am in third year (of altogether four) of Faculty.

My grade school and high school was organized on Hungarian language. My second language in grade school, high school and studies were German. Currently, my knowledge of German language is on "conversational" level. I began to study English language in grade school in English groups. I was participating from 1986 to 1989 on Computer Science Camp in Palics, in organization of Adults Education Center in Subotica. The half of the activity in Camp was learning English. I was in beginner class in the first year, and in advanced class in the next two years. Later, especially due to my range of interests, I was only improving my English knowledge. In my high school days, I spent three years at Petnica Research Center, and we were attending lectures of foreign experts on various themes, mainly on English. Beside this, Petnica has well equipped library, mostly with English literature. In this environment, improving English was easy. I was translating several times from English to Serbian for publications in Petnica’s edition. I can say that Serbian language is my second native language.

In my grade school, I was active in the field of Computer Science. In three years spent on Camp in Palics, I was attending the medium group and two years the advanced group of Computer Science. Beside Palics, I was participating several times on county and state level (ex Yugoslavia, before 1991) competitions. I would mention the state level competition called "Science for young" held in Kragujevac, where I received bronze medal for robotics.

In my high school days, I spent three years in Petnica Research Center. In the first year, I was attending Computer Science lectures and the rest two years on Astronomy lectures. We were divided in several groups, our occupation was meteor observation, but with my lack of ability for night observation (I fell frequently a sleep), I concentrated to computerize the results processing of our group. We were publishing our results in the Petnica’s edition over two years. In my third year spent in Petnica, I was participating in editing and preparing publications for the press. Since I was asked, to be lecture assistant in Petnica, I was participating on Psychology lecture in Palics organized by Soros Foundation. Meanwhile, I took part in local Photo club, and organized state level exhibitions two times by myself. In high school, I reached state level competition in Computer Science for high school students (but I was not enough for a placing).

My choice on the faculty was (what else?) Computer Science. The reason for choosing faculty in Novi Sad is that the lectures given here are very well selected, yet they follow the so called "eastern school". The faculty is not concentrating to teach widespread languages (for example COBOL, C or C++), since the algorithms and the theoretical part of programming (the planning in our head) is language independent. Skill for a given language comes with work in it. The main educative language on the faculty is Modula-2, but we were working with Prolog and Lisp too. My special subjects were about basic programming techniques, functional and logical programming, data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence and operation systems.

When I came to faculty, Yugoslavia was stroke by hyperinflation. In the first moths of my studies, my parents could not insure my study expenses (average payment was then about five US$). I had to get a job, to pay room rent for my elder brother and myself. Since I had some press experiences form Petnica, I started to work in prepress and design studio as operator, and come up to system manager. I learned here to use many software like Ventura Professional, QuarkXPress, PhotoShop, Illustrator, Word. When my field of work exceeded operator’s task, I accepted to manage the computer system, and manage the network together with Novell NetWare server. Than I was engaged in solving problems emerging from DTP, creating utility software and programming in PostScript. In 1997, I left this job, because it restrained my progress on faculty. In these years, I spent my summer vacations in Budapest (Hungary). I had a chance to work as a summer replacement one month in a company affiliated to one company from New York. I was producing and sometimes designing Web pages. In Hungarian domain, I was participating in production of numerous sites. I would emphasize Ford, Borsodi Beer and SuliNet (network of sites financed by Hungarian Government) sites. One month spent in this company helped me to have a better view about essential role of the Internet, especially where it’s current expansion reaches peak.

 Summary

Due to my youth, I cannot consider my Big Book closed. I would like to fulfill any challenge and this put me in front of demand for constant progress. I would like to claim the DTP era closed in my life, because I can offer more than just tossing words on a white paper. Currently, I am engaged in the area of Java programming language. As a member of one little informal group, I am working on a development of totally platform independent Windows Explorer like software, purely in Java.