Who do you nominate for “Developer on focus”?

Nikita Ovsiannikov, Advanced App Engineering Specialist, Accenture Technology

What is the reason to nominate him?

Nikita has always gone that extra step, making sure that no matter the task, he gives maximum effort. Regardless of whether it is a client calling with last minute changes on a cloudy Friday evening or a colleague who does not understand a particular technology or solution, Nikita will stay up and make sure they both get the necessary attention. It is exactly this kind of dedication that has yielded in several of his hours-long lectures, describing each and every aspect of git/ECS/VPCs to new joiners while still guaranteeing the quality in his deliverables. His passion for teaching and making sure no one ever leaves with a question unanswered is probably the reason he was chosen to facilitate last year’s Junior Java Academy. These are just some of the reasons why I think Nikita deserves to be a Developer on Focus.

Please, tell us more about his professional characteristics.

• Hands on
• Striving to perfection
• Impeccable communication skills

Can you describe how his working day goes?

Large portions of his day are spent jumping between meetings, motivating his colleagues, and mentoring the next generation of developers. His passion for teaching can be heard from a mile away (sometimes he could get loud) making sure no question is left unanswered. Any moment not spent in a meeting he takes care of the code, mostly doing code clean ups and reviewing PRs.

What are his challenges? What is he currently working on?

Working on multiple projects and handling several internal initiatives, multitasking is definitely the toughest challenge that Nikita has to overcome. He is currently working as the Tech Lead and Architect for Culturama – a CSR initiative to create a non-profit digital platform in support of the Bulgarian artistic talents. His role includes mentoring the developers, tracking progress and guarantee the world class quality that Accenture is renowned for. On the other hand, he is a senior developer and performance standard validator for a large-scale sustainability project. Jumping from a project to an interview, followed by some internal initiative then back to the project is what Nikita has to overcome, on a daily basis, learning to entrust his colleagues and the team.

Describe him in 3 words.

• Active
• Professionalist
• Perfectionist

Does he take part in the company’s voluntary programs? What are they? Does he have individual campaigns?

Nikita actively spends time taking care of recruitment and teaching responsibilities within the Java department. He started with simple technical interviews, revitalizing the online tests and coding challenges, and maintaining candidate tracking, eventually becoming the Java department recruitment lead. Even so he still had the time, energy, and dedication to facilitate the organization, project planning and candidate selection for the 2021 edition of the Accenture Junior Java Academy, all while completing his daily development tasks.

What are his hobbies?

Nikita is an avid tennis player, playing the sport ever since he was 6 years old with his best friend at the time. To this day he continues to passionately play the sport, albeit mostly as a stress reliever. His other passion lies with Artificial Intelligence and data, currently studying how to leverage NEAT learning algorithm.

What kind of music does he listen to?

Metal, rock, hardbass

Is he interested in gaming?

Yes! Gaming is most likely even the reason why he is part of the software industry in the first place. Starting from a rather young age of 7, Nikita has spent the majority of his childhood glued to the CRT monitors. Since his family did not have a computer at that time, he would spend most of his time with his close friend, gaming and eventually learning programming (the friend’s father was an engineer). This passion for games and programming has been carried on through high school, where he even learned OpenGL to make several 2D phone games.

Who do you nominate for “Developer on focus”?

Martin Dimitrov, an iOS Tech Lead at Appolica.

What is the reason to nominate him?

Martin’s constant desire to improve his skills and the fact that he is always helpful towards everybody is just one of the reasons to nominate him for Developer on focus. Martin Dimitrov has graduated from the Technical University in Sofia with a degree in Computer Software Engineering. He started his career in Appolica as an intern and has grown to being an iOS Tech Lead in just a few years. To this day, he keeps growing together with the company both on a professional and a personal level. Together with one other colleague, Martin leads the iOS team at Appolica. He is always striving to deliver beyond what’s expected, while also keeping up-to-date with the latest innovations in mobile development, suggesting to use new technologies and sharing his experience with the rest of his team.

Please, tell us more about his professional characteristics.

As a developer, Martin is very knowledgeable and curious – always eager to try something new and expand his skills. This is very helpful in the field of mobile development, as things are quite dynamic and one must be flexible and easily adaptable to keep up with this pace. As a leader, he is communicative, he’s able to motivate others and knows how to get things done on time. Martin takes ownership and is always ready to share his knowledge and experience with others.

What individual and team awards does he have?

During our internal Appolica Awards, Martin won the awards for “Most helpful colleague”, as well as the “Giphy award” due to his “passion” for finding the most suitable gifs in every situation.

Tell us more about him as an individual?

Martin is open-hearted, has a good sense of humor and he’s always ready to help his colleagues.

Can you describe how his working day goes?

His day usually begins around 8:30 – 9 am at the office and the first thing he does is to have a cup of some really strong coffee. The first half of the day Martin spends in focused work on his own tasks, as well as meetings for different projects. During lunch, the team often eats together in the kitchen, which is a great non-formal occasion to have some conversations, discussing the latest projects and any issues they might be facing. In the afternoon, Martin checks his team and how far they’ve come with their own tasks, while providing the needed support. The day ends with some sweet talks with the colleagues before heading home for a deserved rest.

What are his challenges? What is he currently working on?

One of his challenges is to do his best at supporting everyone on his team while maintaining his own tasks and staying up to date with new technologies. Nevertheless, he’s actively taking part in Appolica’s team buildings and sport initiatives, while maintaining a healthy social life. At the moment, Martin is working on a big FinTech project for a client from the UK.

Does he help his colleagues with their tasks?

Martin is always very happy to help anyone who needs some guidance and it’s one of his best qualities, which helped him get to where he is today.

Describe him in 3 words.

Helpful, knowledgeable, kind-hearted

Does he take part in the company’s voluntary programs? What are they? Does he have individual campaigns?

Martin has donated blood several times and is always participating in all internal programs that we have.

What are his hobbies?

Martin enjoys playing sports, learning about the latest technology trends, and playing video games. Since last year, he has been very much into snowboarding.

What kind of music does he listen to? How does he have fun?

He pretty much listens to almost everything. His favourite genres are pop-punk and punk rock. He enjoys going out with friends, going on hikes in the mountains in the warmer months and snowboarding in the winter.

Is he interested in gaming?

Yes, he’s very much into console gaming. (but not FIFA 😉 )

What does he prefer – Android or iOS? Why?

Since the very beginning, he’s been using Apple’s products and also working on iOS projects.

What is his style? (clothes, character, etc)

In terms of clothing, anything casual and comfortable is Martin’s style. Something that always draws attention are his incredibly funny T-shirts. He is easy-going and pleasant to communicate with.

Which programming languages does he use? Which are his favorites?

Professionally, Martin has used Swift, Kotlin and Java. Swift has always remained his favourite, as this is the very first programming language he started his career with. Even after seeing how powerful Kotlin can be, Martin still remains faithful to Swift as a preferred language for coding.

Can you tell us an interesting story with him?

I remember the day when we had the opening party of our new office and the whole team was invited to celebrate. A couple of people surprised us with a game, called Appolica’s Pub Quiz (all in a pub quiz style, it just was in the office and not a pub). We all had to draw a number and got put together in random teams of 5-6 people. Martin was on a rival’s team. It was a relatively tough quiz, but also things that some of us are supposed to be familiar with, as the questions varied from geography, football, technology to movies and culture. It was quite a close score between a few teams and it turned out that Martin’s team worked and communicated so well that they actually won by 1 or 2 points! I remember him telling me that they just had people who knew stuff from the different categories, and he was really excited about actually getting a tough Harry Potter question that most big fans couldn’t answer! It was a great night for sure.

Martin Dimitrov fishing

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Martin Dimitrov, a Principal Software Engineer at Milestone Systems.

What is the reason to nominate him?
Martin deserves to be the Developer on focus because of the interesting and very challenging career path that brought him to Milestone Systems. His interest in technologies started at the age of 14 but he always knew he would become an engineer. The engineering part of everything thrills him because he could start a thing from scratch and build something that is working very well. He loves trying new things and exploring working with different programming languages. As a very dedicated professional, he is always open to new ideas and approaches. Working with him is not only fun but also rewarding.

Please, tell us more about his professional characteristics.
Martin really likes experimenting with different technologies. He is flexible when it comes to working with diverse programming languages. He loves learning new things and solving different problems. What makes him a great developer is his ability to think outside the box.

Tell us more about him as an individual?
When Martin is working on something, he deep dives into the problem. Very dedicated and persistent, he always finds the most flexible approaches to solve a problem.

Martin and his son

Can you describe how his working day goes?
For Martin, every day is different. Except for software engineering and diverse technologies, Martin is very interested in finance and stock markets. So, in the morning, he usually discusses these topics over a cup of coffee with like-minded colleagues. After that, he participates in the teams’ daily stand-ups. Then, he focuses on his tasks for the day – sometimes that includes research or refactoring, bug fixing. Overall, he wants to focus on coding as much as possible. Martin is keen on yoga, so he tries to make time 1-2 per week for a yoga class as well.

What are his challenges? What is he currently working on?
The project Martin and his team are currently working on are quite big and challenging. It’s a Data Insights Platform that collects big data sets from different sources, enriches them and provides them through a platform to Milestone partners. The third-party vendors are then able to consume those APIs and create applications based on the data. Other challenges he is currently facing are related to the Cloud. The team is experimenting with different technologies and looking for the best-case scenarios to solve Cloud-related hitches.

Does he help his colleagues with their tasks?
That is part of Martin’s job – he tries to proactively approach more junior colleagues when he senses they are struggling. However, the whole team is structured in а way where everyone is equal. The less experienced people are not afraid to ask questions and bring up new ideas, supported by the senior ones with everything, no matter what.

Martin and his family

Describe him in 3 words.
Dedicated, flexible and persistent.

What are his hobbies?
It won’t surprise anyone that Martin’s hobbies include technologies. He is also interested in finance, stock markets and fishing. As a family man, everything related to his son and wife is a priority for him. He likes hiking and enjoys spending time with his family in the mountain. His son is very keen on Lego, so you can often find him building Lego with his son during the weekends.

What kind of music does he listen to? How does he have fun?
He loves BG rap and hip hop and prefers underground music.

Is he interested in gaming?
He does not like gaming because he took his share when he was in high school.

What does he prefer- Android or iOS? Why?
As an Android user, Marting prefers Anrdoid, but soon, he will switch to iOS because he finds it is way faster and durable.

What is his style? (clothes, character, etc)
Casual smart, he likes to feel comfortable in his clothes.

Martin and his son

Which programming languages does he use? Who are his favourites?
Martin feels most comfortable working with .NET – this is his favourite language because it is powerful and robust. As he likes to say, it is an enterprise language for serious projects. Martin is also a fan of NodeJS, Python, and Go.

Can you tell us an interesting story about him?
Martin graduated from high school in Italy. He lived there with his family. When he turned 18, he decided to come back to Bulgaria to obtain a bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering. However, when he came, he found out that the high school diploma he has from Italy is not relevant here. He had two options – to enrol in high school in Bulgaria and study for another four years for a high school diploma from here, or to forget about studying Software Engineering and receiving his Bachelors. He chose the first option and started high school for the second time at the age of 18. Back then, it was quite shocking and frustrating for him. Now he shares that he does not regret his choice. He was persistent in studying Software Engineering because of the interesting subjects and the professionals he would meet while studying at the university.

Who do you nominate for “Developer on focus”?

Ivo Nikolov, Associate professional programmer analyst in DXC Technology Bulgaria

What is the reason behind your nomination?

Ivo deserves to be a Developer on Focus because of his unique inspiring career path that proves everything is possible if you are passionate about it.

Ivo studied Marketing and entrepreneurship in Scotland. Back in Bulgaria, he landed a position as a Digital Marketing and Sales specialist at DXC. Always eager to learn new things, he decided to take a course in Programming basics with Java and immediately fell in love with coding. He quickly found out that all you need to get started in software development are a problem-solving mindset, curiosity and patience to go through the trials and errors to the successful compilations. This new passion brought him to make a surprising career turnaround. Despite not having any technical background, Ivo wanted to work as a developer and applied for such a position in DXC. His enthusiasm and passion were rewarded, and he started working as a developer on a project for a multinational insurance company. With the new position came new challenges. The job required learning a new programming language specific to the development of DXC Insurance. Without hesitation, Ivo took the internal training and now works as a well-rounded software engineer.

Describe his professional qualities.

Ivo strikes as a professional eager to learn but what makes him a good developer is his impressive problem-solving ability.

Tell us some more about him as a person.

When he’s passionate about something, Ivo invests himself 100%. Challenges are what keeps him going forward.

Can you describe how his typical day goes?

For Ivo, every day of the week varies in terms of routine. Starting work at 9 am, he tries to go through all administrative activities to raise his speed and sharpness. After that, he switches over to the supporting development tasks when his attention to detail is at its highest. In the last 1-2 work hours he prefers to check the completed work, debug and fine-tune the code wherever possible. Following the end of the workday, he goes to a kickboxing session to relieve himself of any stress and meet with friends. And last but not least, before going to bed he watches a video lecture from one of his programming courses, going the extra mile in his software development path.

What challenges does he face? What kind of projects is he working on?

His daily challenge so far is to become as confident as possible in coding with the new programming language. Always striving for perfection, he wants to give his best working on the development of an Insurance solution platform for a DXC customer.

Does it happen sometimes that he helps his colleagues in the execution of their Tasks?

Maybe it is Ivo’s mixed profile that makes him such a good team player and he doesn’t miss an occasion to help a colleague in need. Currently, he is collaborating with a QA specialist to find bugs in the platform.

If you had to describe him with 3 words only, what would they be?

1. Studious
2. Passionate
3. Dedicated

What are their hobbies?

Reading as much as possible for pleasure.

He has chosen kickbox to be his workout and sport activity, but he also likes outdoor running.

When it comes to travel, Bulgarian historical places are his favourite destination.

What kind of music does he listen to? How does he like to have fun?

His choice of music depends on his mood, ranging from old school disco classics from the ’80s to contemporary electronic dance music.
In his free time, Ivo meets with friends and loves going to standup comedy shows. Another passion of his is hiking trips.

Does he like gaming?

When it comes to gaming, Ivo used to play online football-oriented games such as FIFA and PES. Now his favourite game that keeps him up late at night is coding.

Which does he prefer – Android or iOS and why?

As an end-user, he has always been on Android and doesn’t intend to change.
Despite both systems having pros and cons, with Ivo old habits die hard.

What is his style?

His style is rather casual and prefers comfort over trends.

What are the programming languages he uses? Which are the ones he prefers?

His first programming love and preferred language is JAVA. But he also works with GraphTalk – a coding language specific to DXC Insurance platform development.

Can you tell us an interesting story about him?

Ivo shared a fun story that happened to him recently. Currently, he’s attending a course on Windows system administration. Instead of installing a virtual machine on his computer, he wiped up his entire PC with Windows Server and immediately started looking for a professional to reinstall his computer. Until he realized that HE was the professional in question and did it himself.

Yura Grishko – Team leader of game development in Anakatech – Bulgaria

What is the reason behind your nomination?

Yura deserves to be a Developer on Focus because of his unique and successful career path that brought him to relocate from Israel to Bulgaria and establish a new game development department.

His interest in game development started at age of 14, when he started producing small Flash games just for fun. Even though Yura spent his academic years studying Biotechnology, he placed his passion into the subject and wrote complex life simulator programs. At age of 23 he started his IT career as Web developer and shortly promoted to Full Stack Developer. At 25 he followed his passion and landed a position of Game Developer.
Through the years, Yura developed numerous game engines, templates, pipelines, documentation and etc. that eventually led to his initiative to relocate to Bulgaria and establish a new game dev team in Anakatech.

Relocation wasn’t easy for him at first; alone, new country, new language, new culture both ethnically and professionally, unexpected lockdown. But despite the challenges, the plan was a success and a newly formed team through the year showed great performances and produced more than a dozen new original games.

Describe his professional qualities.

His professional qualities can be divided into two – as a developer and as a team lead.

As a developer, Yura is very experienced and shows a very solution-oriented approach to any situation he faces. It means that after identifying the problem, comes the stage of planning the best solution that will work the best for the current situation – if the solution should work for the long term, the resolution will be very methodological with a planning ahead. In other cases – thinking outside a box and workarounds – works the best for one time solutions if they serve the purpose.

As a fresh team lead, Yura still gains his experience by learning from every conflict resolution he faces and by learning from the exceptional staff surrounding him in the company.

Yura is aware of his weaker sides and he is willing to self-improve, so he compensates his lack of experience by collaboration with others, responsible decision making and delivering forward the resolutions with high integrity and with his kind and warm personal approach.

Tell us some more about him as a person.

Besides being highly professional, Yura is a warm positive person, always having time to give his attention to others and help. He is highly motivated and tries to motivate others by self-example, moreover Yura doesn’t like the terminology of being a team “manager” and prefers the terminology of team “leader” because it implies leading the team by showing best practices by self-example.

Can you describe how his typical day goes?

Waking up at 7:05 or 8:00 – depending on if a short workout is planned for the morning.

9:00 – Is a good time to finish breakfast and start reading the mailbox (& reply if needed) and get familiar with the upcoming day.

10:45 – daily morning standup meeting

11:00 – after the standup starting with the most urgent tasks – typically they are investigating and fixing newfound bugs and releasing hotfixes if needed.

12:00 – lunch break – but may shift considerably

13:00 to 16:00 – most of the meetings happen here – they are mostly one of the following:

• Game Kick-Offs before QA or Development and other game specific meeting
• Reviewing with each team member the progress and plan ahead
• 1 on 1 with a team member to assist and resolve any challenges
• Team meetings
• Collaboration meetings to share common practices to improve the development pipeline between the different departments
• Roadmap planning
• And more…

16:00 – working on the rest of tasks and common development time

19:00 – typical end of the day, even though sometimes more work is done before sleep between 22:00 and 24:00

What challenges does he face? What kind of projects is he working on?

His main challenge is the relocation to Bulgaria and establishing a new game development team. Relocation is not an easy task, first you have to leave everything behind: family, friends, apartment, most of your possessions, and then after the relocation you acquire everything anew, face the unforgiving Bulgarian bureaucracy, learn a new language and try to find a place for yourself. Meanwhile Yura also has to form a new game development department, find and interview new people, board them into the company, teach them how to produce games, listen for their needs and provide his support.

Does it happen sometimes that he helps his colleagues in the execution of their Tasks?

It happens all the time. Yura basically relocated to Bulgaria to establish a new game development team to share his experience, knowledge and best practices. By doing so Yura established himself as the main target for anyone to ask for help and advice, not only for his direct teammates, but also for colleagues from other departments, from Art, Product, QA up to NOC and CRM.

If you had to describe him with 3 words only, what would they be?

1. Ambitious
2. Smart
3. Friendly

Does he take part in the initiatives of the company? What kind of initiatives? Has he launched his own initiatives?

Yes, lots of them.

After finishing establishing a new game development department in Bulgaria, he pushes forward his other initiatives. Like initiative to replace parts of manual QA for games by advanced Automation tools. More production pipeline optimizations.
Additionally Yura launched his own Game Jam so the developers could have an opportunity to improve their skills and have fun.

What are his hobbies?

He is a very creative person, besides doing games he also likes to craft some small projects, by hand or by using his 3D printer and integrating Arduino into them. Also his creativity expressed by passion for drawing, semi-professional photography and videography.
Another passion of his is biology and nature, besides regular nature traveling, Yura volunteered for two years in a Hospital for Wild Animals, during this activity he helped hundreds of animals to recover and return to the wild.

What kind of music does he listen to? How does he like to have fun?

Yura likes to listen to music a lot, especially when he does something, and the kind of music very depends on the activity he does. For coding and work the best are soundtracks from games, they are designed to be background music and give a feeling that you are progressing well while not containing any lyrics that might mess with your head while coding.
For workout and sport activities better to listen to more modern music and higher bitrate remixes that pump up the motivation.
And last, just to enjoy the music, you can find music from all over the 70s, 80s, 90s and more…

Does he like gaming?

As a game developer, you have to be passionate about games! Yura is not an exception, he likes not only to play games, but also to try to figure out how some games are made, watch game design content channels, try to develop his own small games, and recently Yura launched his own Game Jam within his colleagues both in Israel and Bulgaria.

Few of his suggestions for games: Faster Than Light (2012), Papers Please (2013), Spelunky 1/2 (2008/2020), The Witcher 3 (2015)

Which does he prefer – Android or iOS and why?

As an end user, both platforms are totally fine in terms of their user experience. As a developer small personal preference to use Android in terms of how easy it is to plug and debug.

What are the programming languages he uses? Which are the ones he prefers?

Yura‘s coding “Mothers tongue” is “C#”, but in the last few years as more front-end oriented development he switched to JavaScript and recently to TypeScript as a combined power of JavaScript and OOP. But the coding language is not as important as the inner logic, architecture and the end result.