Looking back

I’ve been working as an architect and chief architect for TOPAZ Technologies LLC more than 6 years. It has been an exciting time and I have learned a lot. In 2009 I inherited an enterprise application that, let’s say it this way, provided many interesting challenges to me and my development teams. Over time I had the chance to significantly extend, modernize and harden the application. Thanks to a wonderful collaboration with my supervisor with whom I had a mutual trust based relationship I was able to gradually introduce many modern architectural patterns like CQRS, Event Sourcing and REST. We also migrated more and more towards a task based front end, eliminated the need for a (as I always felt “awkward”) save button by embracing auto-save everywhere. Furthermore DDD played a key role in our development process.

To support our application on the back-end we use GetEventStore for the write model and Lucene.NET, Mongo DB and either SQL Server or Oracle for our various read models. We have been able to successfully move some of our biggest clients to the cloud.

During my time with TOPAZ we also moved away from a Silverlight based front-end to a pure and plug-in free web client based on HTML5/CSS3 and JavaScript using Angular JS as the client side framework to build multiple SPAs.

We always had a strong QA team to test the software we release, but we wanted more and I was able adjust our development process such as that no new feature is added to the application without it being fully covered by automated end-to-end tests. Together with the rigorous code reviews that we perform for each feature or bug fix this gives us a very high confidence that we are producing and releasing robust software from the very beginning.

Although the work I did has always been super exciting and challenging I started to feel that I need to move on. I realize that I am still full of energy and that I want to grow even more. I know that there is so much that I can learn even after having been working for more that 20 years in the software industry.

At this place I want to thank each member of my teams in Austin and in Bangalore, India for the wonderful collaboration. Without your skills, passion and hard work we would not have achieved what we have now. I am honored to have been working with you all. I wish you all the best.

My new job

Today I am very exited to announce that I am now a member of the ever growing ClearMeasure family. My new role is that of a principal software architect. For me this is a unique opportunity to work with a team of world class experts. It’s a big honor for me to be amongst such super smart people. Although I had several compelling job offers it was clear to me that I wanted to join ClearMeasure when our CEO Jeffrey Palermo reached out to me. Why? There are several reasons but one of the most important one is the fact that ClearMeasure as a company has and enforces values that I wholeheartedly support. Let me present short quotes of those values.

Relationships: Relationships are our principal assets. We create, cultivate and strengthen meaningful relationships…

Serving Others First: We are a company of servant leaders. We adhere to maxim that “I come second”…

Excellence: We are the best in our field. We hire and develop our people to continually seek the highest levels of professional excellence…

Leadership: We take the lead because it maximizes the value of our services to our clients, partners and employees. We know that leadership never goes our of style…

Authenticity: We are Candid. Authentic. Respectful… And Clear. Our behavior matches our words – which defines integrity…

Results: We never quit. We focus on delivering measurable results – early and often – for our clients and for each other…

Did you know that ClearMeasure is hiring? If you are passionate about software development, if you are smart and never stop improving yourself and if you can live up to the company’s core values presented above then you should definitely contact us either by sending me a note or even better via the company’s web site or glassdoor.