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. 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.
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:
- retention and hiring: how to motivate teams, optimizing the hiring funnel and hiring new talent
- culture and branding: cultivate non-toxic culture and IC growth, promote the team and the company, lead implementor of 4-day work-week
- organization: structuring output-focused lean teams for optimum impact and fluent communication
- growth: helping new leaders to grow
- budgeting: hiring plans, promotions
- ISO 27001: implementation of ISO 27001, security processes and procedures, IS risk management
- product: ensuring product quality and setting up relevant QA metrics
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.
