Hello, my name is Marius
Working for over two decades in technology, I managed to cover all aspects of developing commercial software applications. I worked in three industries: automotive, media and publishing, I experienced both Waterfall and Agile development philosophies, I worked in very large corporations as well as mid and small size companies, I witnessed three acquisitions and I have been part of multi-cultural environments between the American and the Indian Silicon Valley, with emphasis on Europe
Who I am
Being an internally driven person, I draw my energy from working for a mission. I am always invested in what I do and I put a lot of #passion in it. This makes me highly independent and very low maintenance. However, I’m not a lone rider, I thrive in highly collaborative environments, based on trust and mutual respect. I speak my mind rather assertively in psychologically safe environments, for I believe in compassionate radical honesty..
#craftsmanship is definitory for all the work I do. It is not the focus on details but rather putting first the fundamentals, the #concept, the solid structure, for any plan or construction. No matter what I do, I do it to the best extent of my capabilities. I ask the same from all the people I work with. I usually take the harder path that creates longer term value and I accept cutting corners only as exceptional cases.
I crave to learn new things, develop new skills and explore new areas. These help me build a broad view and enable me to connect the dots of very complex issues. Analogies are a source of inspiration for solutions and also a means to explain concepts. I am an #engineer at heart, so no matter the challenge I am confronted with, I approach it in a structured manner, understanding the issue, framing the problem, defining the solution and following through with the implementation.
I am not a visionary/enthusiast, therefore I am best suited to support a forward looking leader. My logical and critical thinking enable me to work effectively on strategy definitions. I can also bring in a high degree of #creativity, which can result in bold and non-standard, #disruptive approaches.
I am a #storyteller, which helps me evangelize ideas and disseminate concepts. I share my experience as a mentor whenever I have the chance. I use this ability to fuel the collaboration within the team, to get everyone on the same page and to inspire and motivate.
Organizational development
Acting in various management positions, from team lead to executive roles, I have done hands-on construction of software organizations. I started with interviewing, technical mentoring, development of onboarding programs and deployment of learning programs. Then I dived into talent development, improvement of performance management processes, definition of job market strategies (particularly the definition of value proposition) and creation of leadership programs. Later I went through deployment and optimization of software development methodologies and frameworks (V-cycle, Scrum, Kanban, etc), compliance with either technical (ISO, ANSI), management (TPS) or legal standards (SoX, GDPR) and adherence to frameworks and models (CMMi, SaFE). As a particular aspect, I have a lot of experience with integrating off-shore organizations.
The organizations I managed were usually a stand alone legal entity, therefore I had to handle incorporation, financial planning, oversee accounting and procurement, employment contracts, vendor contracting, outsourcing, as well as other legal obligations (i.e. occupational safety, imports). Additionally, I have done external representation with regard to local authorities, the academic environment, as well as business associations.
As an executive, I have worked on deploying innovative operating systems (VMS, roles & missions), strategic development of the technology organization, definition and deployment of organizational culture and interfacing technology with the other business areas. I participated in the definition of company strategy and assured a full alignment with the strategy for technology. I have also been part of a company sale process and supported audits from potential buyers.
Software product development
My hands-on experience in software development is with real time embedded applications. There I worked with C and various flavors of assembly language, on several 32 bit chips, writing drives and OS services. I had full control over the build pipeline, a thorough understanding of the hardware we operated on and a full view of the layered and scalable architecture. The major challenges were around data consistency, concurrency issues, preemptive and non-preemptive multithreading and, above all, time constraints.
My experience with event driven distributed web applications comes from the interaction with the teams that developed the software. In order to make decisions on the product architecture or the organizational structure, I got acquainted with Kubernetes and Elastic Beanstalk, AWS resources and services (VMs, S3, SNS/SQS, ElasticSearch), the Git CI/CD (Gitlab to be more precise), Apollo GraphQL and a few others. I worked directly with the software architects in order to transpose business and product decisions into the implementation.
In my opinion, the key for building a solid software application is in the architecture - it is arguably the only way for integrating non-functional requirements: scalability, availability, maintainability, reliability, security and other ‘ilities’. When combined with a design pattern (in this case Domain Driven Design), it becomes obvious that there is no boundary between the product and the software architecture. And equally important, it is the mirror of organizational design, as explained by Melvin Conway.