Good life either requires intelligence, ignorance or just being a decent human being. The older I get the more I see how much I still don’t understand and how many things I don’t know. This is why I really enjoy my Kindle (and after nine years the darn thing still works flawlessly) for reading books of various topics. I am vastly interested in technology, engineerg being my passion.
A pivot to management forced me to learn a tremendous amount of other engineering domains, product and business in general ... and I like it, I like learning new things.
I also enjoy reading. Here are some book titles I think they’re worth reading:
- Extreme Ownership,
- The Goal,
- The God Delusion,
- Factfulness,
- The Selfish Gene,
- The Gorilla Mindset,
- Mistakes Were Made (but not by me),
- Good Strategy, Bad Strategy,
- Team Topologies,
- The Manager's Path.
Some of them are more technical, some self-help but those are the ones that really made an impact on me.
Professionally I was a software developer before I pursued a management career. Now I manage engineering teams to create and grow. Sometimes I go with the nickname “napsy” as this is also visible on github pages.
Currently I'm the VP of Engineering at Visionect (here's a neat flowchart of my role).
In my personal life I still code, have a couple of open-source projects, bike, hike, enjoy a good wine here and there and am in a happy relationship.
How to reach me:
For over 15 years, I have been deeply involved in software engineering, continually refining my expertise and adapting to the ever-evolving landscape of technology.
Early in my journey, I dedicated myself to mastering the C programming language—a foundational pillar in the software world. In time, I also ventured into the realm of Go, attracted by its simplicity, speed and efficiency.
My passion for backend engineering not only challenged me to write efficient code but also guided me towards gaining deep insights into software engineering practices and sophisticated architectural design.
This dedication has equipped me with a comprehensive understanding of building robust, scalable, and maintainable systems, ensuring that I bring innovation to every project I undertake.
If I would summarize my experience in bullet points ... well, this is how they would look:
- Go programming language
- C programming language
- awk, bash
- lua, python, rust
Pivoting into management was the next step in my career. After leading software projects, I took the lead of a single small team. And after that, the number of teams under my management grew, including backend, mobile and frontend engineers, and leading platform and product-oriented cross-functioning teams.
Being a manager greatly differs from being an engineer and the role requires new skills, daily rituals, different tools and having a more strategic mindset instead of focusing only on daily operations.
To name a few:
- Engineering Team Leadership & Development: Leading and developing engineering managers and senior ICs through regular 1:1s, team syncs, and performance reviews. Facilitating cross-team collaboration through leadership forums focused on knowledge sharing, hybrid work practices, and career growth.
- Engineering Process & Delivery Excellence: Establishing and optimizing engineering workflows including QA processes, release management, and sprint planning. Running recurring syncs to ensure delivery predictability and driving performance and stability initiatives across teams.
- Strategic Planning & Executive Alignment: Conducting regular executive syncs on engineering status, blockers, and product alignment. Owning KPI reviews, budget planning, and annual roadmap cycles. Translating business objectives into engineering priorities and resource allocation.
- Cross-functional Stakeholder Management: Partnering with Product, HR, and company leadership to ensure engineering priorities align with business goals. Driving structured alignment meetings across departments to maintain organizational coherence.
- Vendor Management & Infrastructure Cost Optimization: Negotiating cloud infrastructure contracts, evaluating tooling investments, and managing engineering SaaS spend. Driving FinOps practices and optimizing infrastructure commitments.
- Technical Hiring & Team Scaling: Leading end-to-end recruitment including screening, technical assessments, and final hiring decisions. Evaluating external development partners and onboarding new team members.
- Security, Compliance & Technical Governance: Owning security posture reviews, access audits, and compliance initiatives. Maintaining dedicated time for vulnerability management and driving retrospectives to capture technical learnings.
There are other aspects of being a lead, besides the bullet points above and some are learned by experience:
- your team performance is your performance,
- good strategy is important, consciously focus on it,
- doing something is sometimes better than doing nothing.
There are numerous technologies I've encountered in my career and some are actually worth mentioning as good tech and tooling is important.
My favourites are:
- monitoring: ELK stack, grafana, prometheus
- coding: vim, gdb, valgrind, kcachegrind, vscode
- infrastructure: docker, kubernetes, terraform
- CI/CD: Gitlab & Gitlab pipelines.
- Cloud: Google Cloud infra. management, cost optimizations, cloud security, availability management and service scale-out
I love playing with AI and I'm no stranger to OpenAI API and AI prompts. Knowledge how to utilize modern AI tech should be a priority as it significantly boosts productivity.
Articles
Welcome to my articles section. Here, I share my thoughts, experiences, and insights on various topics related to software engineering, management, and technology.
