Meet our colleague Aurelian Maga, an accomplished specialist with over 20 years of software development experience. His 10-year career path within our company naturally took him from Software Engineering to Software Architecture, giving Aurelian plenty of room for exploration in both technical and managerial roles.
Get a glimpse #BehindTheCode. Read about Aurelian’s career journey, the e-commerce projects he is currently working on, and his lifelong passion for software development.
Tell us about yourself and your professional background.
I studied Telecommunications at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. After graduation, a natural choice for me was to start my career at a telecom company. I worked as a software engineer on exciting projects for more than four years. Next, I moved overseas, working for a big multinational company for a couple of years. I then followed my path at a small company doing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions for the North American market. All great and enriching experiences.
How did your journey with our company begin? Please describe your career journey and your current role.
I joined the company in 2010. Since then, I have held various technical or management roles in the company. However, I always returned to what I like the most: software development. I had the opportunity to be involved in an eCommerce project from, as they say, cradle to grave, learning along the way and launching distinct iterations of its products. At the same time, I was helping with various projects and clients from different industries that I lost track of.
My first project was in online grocery: we provide digital experiences to grocery store shoppers: digital flyers as software development. I was tasked with developing new features, transitioning knowledge from the US team to the Romanian team, and growing the team. It was a great experience, since I had to wear multiple hats in the process. We started with two people and reached 250 at the project’s peak. For me, the technical part was still the core aspect of my work, but I did my best to provide support in growing the team. It was a period when Web 2.0 was still developing, so there were a lot of learning opportunities to make the grocery platform succeed in the market. Watching the emergent technologies, like NodeJS and Xamarin, was something that I enjoyed. I was also recommending the company to adopt them.
Now, my daily job involves the migration of existing on-prem services to the Azure cloud for a car sale company (WBAC). Interviewing new candidates and discussing new directions are also activities that give me a nice break from projects. Besides my activities as a technical consultant for different projects, I have also gotten involved in various student programs and helped open our delivery center in Brașov.
Aurelian and the team of high school students he mentored in the DPIT program.
Could you briefly describe a favorite project?
An online grocery was a fascinating domain to work on. While from the outside it looked straightforward, things changed when you were on the other end. I remember the reluctance of the client to adopt new technologies, while today when everything is as streamlined as possible, the “cloud” stack is the norm. My team was working on integrating various features, taking care of specifications, implementation, testing, and releasing features.
What was the project’s tech stack like?
We were running on Google Cloud Kubernetes using MongoDB and Redis cache, all linked with .NET (C#) sauce😊.
What was your favorite thing about this project?
Seeing the grocery industry and the project evolving made you understand the need to adapt, namely adopting new technologies and processes. Then, there was the joy of knowing that someone was using your product, and hopefully, you had made their life easier.
What was the most challenging thing(s) about this project?
The platform was relatively new, so understanding it required time before jumping on and adding new features. At the beginning of my career, a poster said that only 10% was coding when working on a feature; I can say this is still true today😊.
How about the team? What was the vibe?
The team was relatively new, formed less than six months before, and we were still getting to know each other. Given the context, the way you see people online did not prepare you for IRL (in real life), as I had learned hands-on. The other day at the office, I noticed someone looking at me, and it took a little bit to realize it was one of my teammates😊. However, we gathered a great, supportive, and friendly team.
Tell us about your last challenge. Did you enjoy it?
My last challenge was in a side project in the IVR industry, where text-to-speech technology is one of the building blocks. Regarding the Romanian language, the support was not great back in 2015. So, I took on and enjoyed the challenge of setting up and running various open-source projects for doing just that, a text-to-speech system for the Romanian language.
What do you like doing in your spare time?
In my spare time, I like tinkering with small IoT projects and keeping up with various topics in physics. I also like skiing, and lately, I have discovered ski touring. When the weather allows, I try to get there and practice it. Summers are for family vacations, as long as there is water around. Happy moments create great memories.
Recently, Fortech became GlobalLogic in Romania. What’s next in your career journey, and what do you expect?
I am looking forward to sharing my knowledge and experience, while learning/growing by myself. Hopefully, others can learn from them and start their path with an advantage. GenAI is a new topic being explored by GlobalLogic; as such, I am involved in a QA tests generation solution using GenAI technologies.