It's About The Data

As a computer science student I loved to do things in my way, and now, after more than 30 years I'm still happy to express myself by elaborating personal projects, even if I consider very important to respect customers by offering them great user experience, and my engineer colleagues by valuing their processes.

With a BCS obtained in the 80s in a Comecon country, over the years I've had to dig my way out of improper tools and ignorance - just like most of my peers.

Due to life circumstances I've learned listening users attentively  and testing my code accurately long time before having the opportunity to join a team of engineers and working for the market. That time I knew nothing about processes, practices and habits, but as a synthetic thinker I was fascinated by the architecture of their product, one of the few integrated software packages available that time in my country.

Given that for decades capital deficiency has been one of the essential problems of my geographic zone, I've tried to do my best to meet people, who have been interested in attracting investors from other countries.

The global spread of the low-cost Internet has made  possible to millions of people like-minded to me to start telecommuting and learning proactively, not only following instructions. That was the moment when I realized that the knowledge of searching, filtering and analyzing data is one of the key skills for managing ourselves in the 21st century.

Then I've experienced the importance of the "learning by doing" method for developing and testing software, and I've taken courses for having a better understanding of the big picture: SDLC types and agile frameworks like scrum, lean and recently DevOps.

Taking a well-elaborated DevOps course has been of great help to me in understanding the importance of doing software development and maintenance in small steps, driven by hypothesis and experiments supported by data collected in production.

Filling data stores with numbers resulting from continuous monitoring or each visitor's route on a website is not about dehumanizing the relationship with users - listening the user voice (by the means of support, social networks and surveys) is also essential for gathering data in order to make the right decisions at the right time.

DevOps practitioners consider that starting from the lean practices and making use of automation, data mining, experimentation and continuous learning in rapid iterations is more efficient for navigating our globalized data lake, than prioritizing backlog items based on 1-2 person's opinions.