What happened?
Hi again!
My last post here in Medium was published on April 8th, 2021 and was about how I saw Abstract Algebra should be done. And today is Sunday, December 4th, 2022 (actually it is almost December 5th here is Sofia, Bulgaria)… So what happened? The short answer is destiny :)
But before destiny happened I was way too busy helping second year university students learn and master the Design and Analysis of Algorithms while studying Distributed Systems on my own. So this is way I haven’t posted anything before May 2021 when destiny offered me the chance to join one of the greatest teams in VMware :) You may wonder why I just used the word destiny. Let me explain!
Sometime in May 2021 VMware Bulgaria had an online career event which I attended only because one of the famous people from Carbon Black was going to present the projected there. But before the product presentations there was a one hour time window dedicated only for networking with recruiters and I took my chance and entered on the waiting queue. There I met my recruiter. During our talk I told her that I’m actually not looking for a job and that I was there only for the presentations of Carbon Black and VMC. Then I used the time to validate my future plan — continue learning as much as possible about (Large Scale) Distributed Systems for a time frame of 4 months and then start looking for a job! And I believe that it is fair to mention that I was so dedicated in learning about Distributed Systems only because in the end of November 2020 I applied for internship position in Uber and I failed miserably because of my ego — I decided to master Go for less then two weeks and just ace their coding interviews without preparing much for coding interviews… Well I learned a lot about Go but as I said I failed horribly. Looking at all of this today I really believe that this is just how things were meant to happen for me :) But let’s get back to my talk with my recruiter in VMware. After the recruiter listened very carefully what I had to say she told me that she thinks that it is better for me to just apply and that she has the perfect team and project for me and that I will learn way more by joining them. And as you may guess I said something like “Okay, let’s try this!” to her. And the rest is history! Well, not really!
So I started an interview process with VMware but parallel to that I also applied to two other companies which I’ll call “Company A” and “Company B” because LinkedIn is just such an awesome social network :) Not joking I really believe that LinkedIn is the best social network right now only because the content there is mostly positive (let’s pretend that Elon Musk did not bought Twitter and that Mark Zuckerberg is not burning tremendous volume of cash for a second or two) and there is just so much knowledge and opportunities there. Like literally LinkedIn is a positive life changer for so much people every day, and I’m very happy about it!
I applied for a role in “Company A” because LinkedIn recommended it to me and I also knew that the teams of one particular Senior Manager there were consisting mostly from 10x Devs and that this Senior Manager was really awesome Manager and person! Fun fact one of those 10x Devs joined my team at some point and he was actually more than 10x Dev ;)
I applied to “Company B” because I saw that one very famous Engineer from Uber Sofia has become a Manager there and I thought that if he is there then this is definitely a great company and that I should try there as well :) And although that I did not joined that company I still believe that it is a great company because of the people there and the product that they are building!
You may wonder why I did not re-applied to Uber if I wanted to become part of it in the end of 2020? And the answer is very simple — I did not felt worthy to be part of Uber at that point in time because of my failure in November… That failure had hit me extremely hard because I was like a super star in my University — I was Teaching Assistant in almost all of the hardest subjects there and I failed for an intern position…
Anyway let me continue my story :) So the interview process for me at VMware was super short, only two interviews — one with my future Manager and one with a very Senior Engineer in the team I was about to join. And I can tell each of those two interviews alone was more then enough for me to be sure that what my recruiter told me was not a lie! This was really the perfect team and project for me! And I’m extremely happy that I joined them — I was the 6th Engineer to join that team (I’m excluding my Manager and the Tech Lead of the team at that time). Like I said in the beginning of this post — I do believe that everything was just meant to happen and that this was (is) my destiny! This is why I accepted the offer by VMware and rejected the other twos even though “Company B” tried to offer me a lot more money because they really liked me and wanted me to join them. (I also liked them and as I said I believe that they are awesome, but I have taken the decision already.)
So I joined my team and became part of VMware :)
Then I followed what Elon Musk is saying he has done — I worked freaking hard so I can become twice as good in much shorter period of time!
I’m actually not joking I really worked super hard. During my first year working more than 8 hours a day was the norm for me. Sometimes I took extra tasks, most of which were code refactoring, during weekends on my own so I can improve our code and so I can experiment and try different things :)
Why I worked so hard? First because I saw this as a great way to invest in my self and second because I wanted to help my team with what ever I could to deliver the project we were work on!
I guess it will not be a surprise if I tell you that I was promoted on the first promotion cycle for VMware after I joined!
Because I was so busy with my work at VMware I did not had much time to blog… But there were multiple changes in the department my team is part of that affected my team and the project we were working on in the last months. But also Musk took over Twitter and is doing his best to “Let it sink”… And as we all know the layoffs at Twitter are not the only ones that happened recently. But also other events that happened recently in my life made me re-evaluate my life choices and this is why I decided to start blogging again :) Only this time I’m committed to blog at least once a week!
I have just so much to say/blog about so stay tuned!
Thank you for reading all of the above, and goodbye! (for now)
