With more than thirteen years of experience in the market and many hours as a Java Trainer, Laurentiu is not only a passionate public speaker, he is also one of the most supportive guys when it comes to technical interviews, training programmes and even engagement activities.
He is always preaching the importance of both growing your soft skills and finding a healthy balance between continuous education and chasing your passions.
Read on to find what drives Laurentiu as a professional and what spikes his interest on a personal level.
Can you please give us some highlights of your career until now?
I started my career in the 12th grade, in an advertising agency. It was 2008, and back then, I was doing web apps, mainly developed in PHP and, I remember that I was covering everything that was related to the network and our servers.
While entering the faculty at FILS (Engineering Faculty in Foreign Languages) at the Polytechnic University, I also started the CCNA courses organized by Cisco. After graduating, I entered in contact with Java Fundamentals area and gradually became the professor on this topic in the Cisco Academy. I have to say that I enjoyed the transition from hardware to software incredibly.
After the university, I decided to follow the Master Programme in Economic Informatics in ASE (Academy of Economic Sciences).
In 2013 I graduated as a Java Programmer, but during that entire time, I was working mainly with PHP and delivering the courses organised by Cisco. The classes were starting at 18.00 and ending at 22.00. It was a hectic period of my life.
How would you describe your career in Endava until now?
I joined Endava two years ago, in July 2017 and ever since I have been working for the backend of a payments app, in Cloud, 12 factor-based, open shift, SQL, having an architecture based on micro-services. We developed this project from scratch for our customer, and I can say it was a real success.
From the first moment, I liked that I was in direct contact with the client who gave us the liberty of deciding on how to proceed with the projects. He trusted the team working on the projects and allowed us to make decisions, in order for the resources to be used correctly. I can say that we had a real partnership with the client, and this is a key factor for success.
At the moment I am the Technical Lead in my team. I am in charge of communicating with the client, developing the project architecture, organising the team and providing technical support on the development side.
Outside the project, I am a community lead. I help with planning and having the hiring interviews, organising training sessions and helping others to plan theirs, delivering internal and external presentations.
While in Endava, I also had the opportunity of participating as a speaker in numerous conferences in Romania and other countries in Europe, even the United States.
Developing my soft skills and working more with people was very important for my future development. This is why even now I enjoy participating and lecturing courses and being a speaker at different conferences. Another area that I’m focused on at the moment is the client-service.