Hi, I’m Yordan - a Jack of all trades, master of some. I ensure my stakeholders have valuable insights using my experience in the tech space and passion for people and data to empower better decisions and impact business growth. I wrote my first line of code nearly 20 years ago and worked in IT for over ten years.
I share stories and thoughts about technologies, people, productivity and management in the data field.
Here’s my offer. If you plan to be anywhere near where I live, where I work or where I might be at some point and want to talk about technology, data, startups, or anything, I’d love to buy you a coffee and chat.
I live in a small village near Plovdiv, Bulgaria, but you can find me at several conferences I attend or organise in Bulgaria. I also exist online. The best way to get my attention is to drop me an email, but I’d love it if we connect on LinkedIn or X.
My story
I started coding at school back in 2003 but found my passion in programming about two years later. That is s when I started modding my favourite game at that time, Counter-Strike. Those blood effects I added were sick.
I landed my first programming job in 2010 in a small company with two engineers and one graphical designer. For the short time I stayed, we developed one web-based game from start to end. We also finished another started by an external company. We built quite a few websites. Some of them are still alive and with their original design. That’s also when my first daughter was born, and I got my BCS degree.
Next was my job at a StreamingVideoProvider. The team there was bigger - four engineers and a designer. How much we achieved in the six years I stayed there is unbelievable. I worked on every corner of the service - infrastructure, streaming, IoT hardware, back-end and front-end. I’m particularly proud of how quick and flexible the video player is. I’m even prouder with the change of mindset and processes I brought when we switched from SVN to Git. Aside from research and development, my main task was onboarding and levelling every new hire. I developed a process to help a couple of my colleagues move from trainee to independent in a few months. It’s great to see some of them are leading teams now. My second daughter was born then, and I got my MCS degree.
After that, I joined Dext (Receipt Bank back then). That is the largest company I’ve worked for so far. When I joined, we were less than 200 people. I was the only data engineer. I was working on an already-started Proof of Concept project with PySpark. The project gained popularity within the company. Soon, every department wanted to use these sweet dashboards. The company grew to more than 500 people and the analytics team to more than ten. We started with a couple of gigs of data and now store hundreds of terabytes of it. We had to revisit tooling and processes while ensuring our data - was secure, reliable and up-to-date. Aside from the technical challenges, I learned how to work remotely, communicate effectively, and think more strategically. My family and I moved to our house in the countryside that we built from scratch. Also, our third daughter was born.
Apart from my career and life, I’m part of a small non-profit. We organise free events dedicated to open-source software and hardware. Our main event is an annual conference in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, but my favourites are the workshops for kids.
That is who I am - a tech-savvy nerd, hard worker, lifelong learner, husband and father of three wonderful girls. How do I manage to balance all that? I live on the edge of burnout. Well, that’s not entirely true. I am obsessed with productivity. I also spend my free time doing hard physical work.
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