It's time to meet you with Martin Angelov. He's a passionate software developer, but he's also very active and busy with a lot of other activities. Some of them are teaching at HackBulgaria "Programming 101 with Python" course, doing sports, dancing Bulgarian folk dances, cooking, organizing team building events, and so on.
Martin tends to be one of the most active and extroverted people in the team. It's never boring with his sense of humor and loud laughing.
More about his story and advice on how to become a good software developer read in the interview.
Can you tell us more about yourself?
I'm Marto - a proud member of the whole Hack community.
I've been working at HackSoft for nearly 5 years now. I took part in several projects during that time. At the moment, I'm a technical team lead in one of our main projects - Kallanish.
Why are you at HackSoft?
- The company values have a really clear projection on my own ones.
- I feel no stagnation - every new project is like a new job to me.
- The freedom.
What was the last thing you learned at work?
Last week, we had an outage which was mainly caused by a slow search. I managed to optimize it using GIN and GIST indexes in Postgres. I haven't used them before - this is the newest thing I've learned.
What's your favorite tool you use daily?
Slack! We use it in HackSoft for chatting.
Being good at communicating with your clients, team and colleagues is an essential skill that you should improve if you want to become a better developer.
What do you like most about your daily tasks?
Helping others do their job. Either by helping anyone from my team or a client do what they need to do makes me feel satisfied.
What do you like most about our company culture?
The empathy. In my honest opinion, this is one of the hardest things you can find nowadays. Not only at work.
What helped you become a better software developer?
Becoming a better software developer is not a goal or a task - it's an infinite process, a way of life. You have to ground for this with every new problem you need to solve. Understanding this very early in my career helped me a lot.
What is the most important skill that would make you a better developer?
The most important skill that you need to master is asking the right questions. It'll make you better in each aspect of your work - from debugging a shit piece of code to gathering requirements.
What's the most important piece of advice you would like to pass to the junior developers?
Find a place where you feel trusted, and respected and you'll definitely love what you do. Never stop learning and grow your mindset!
