New Blog. Who dis?

I attended the B.P. Hasdeu High School in my hometown of Buzau, finishing with a degree in Mathematics and Informatics, with a special focus on English. I confess that I was not a huge fan of the first two subjects at that time. Consequently, my choice of university was a lucky one, as it turned out in the future. This choice was the Authomatics and Computers Faculty of the Politechnic University of Bucharest, from which I graduated in 2015 with a Bachelor of Engineering. Even though I found programming and engineering to be a smart and interesting thing to do at that time, I failed to find much practical meaning into it. It was just too abstract for me.

The meaning of programming and computer science knocked on my door one beautiful day in the spring of 2013. I was accepted at BitDefender for the internship position of Quality Assurance Analyst. It was one of the best moment of my life. There were actual people in an actual company who actually needed me to actually work with them. And they had free coffee and air conditioning in the office. During the amazing summer of 2013 I discovered my passion for automation, as I developed a Java and Batch based solution that tested file transfer between a couple of Android devices, using the transfer application my team was building at the time. They proposed I should stay employed full-time after the internship was over, but sadly I had to turn them down since the third year of college was rumored to be the most demanding of all. The rumors were true.

In 2014 I was accepted for another internship at Renault Technologie Roumanie, which was not exactly what I expected to be. Even so, I did develop a Java Swing based application that helped the team check some calibration files they used for testing. I was even rewarded a toy car for the app, but sadly I had to give it away after a few weeks 😢. I am still not over that.

During my automated testing experience, I realised that I enjoyed coding significantly more than testing. I applied for a Software Developer position and received the opportunity to work at Microsoft in the summer of 2017, for one of its most hyped products, Microsoft Teams. This also involved a relocation to Prague, making the experience even more challenging. After working on the Teams AngularJS client for a year, I switched gears to the FluentUI (formerly known as StardustUI) component library, and started to build ReactJS components using TypeScript, prioritising automated testing and accessibility. Joined by a couple of colleagues, I delivered a demo at CSUN 2019 about the Microsoft Teams Callings and Meetings experience, along with its accessibility features and support. While working on Fluent I also came into contact with the Downshift npm library and its creator, Kent C Dodds.

I came back to Bucharest in the infamous year of 2020, and joined Adobe again, this time as a FrontEnd Developer for Adobe Target. I had the opportunity to apply what I learned in terms of accessibility, automated testing and design systems. During that time I had the incredible opportunity to be a speaker at Deque's axe-con in 2021, where I presented Downshift's hooks API. Here's the link to the recording.

In January 2022 I joined the Estonian company Bolt, where I helped building their Design System. I implemented ReactJS web components to be reused by other teams in their products. It was a great experience to build a component library from the ground up, balancing features according to immediate client needs.

Since middle of December I returned to Microsoft, where I reconnected with many of my colleagues from Microsoft Teams.