I was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1991. I attended a biotechnology gymnasium highschool. For my bachelor I studied Defence Studies which is a political science major interleaved with military subjects and army basic training. During that time I discovered MOOCs and realised I am very interested in natural sciences, even more so in neuroscience. This led me to join the Master’s program of Cognitive Science, where I learned a wide variety of topics and realized basic science is what drives me most.
I found a matching master thesis project and joined Manuel Zimmers lab and moved to Vienna, Austria. After finishing my master’s thesis project, I got accepted to the Ph.D. program of IST (Institute of Science and Technology). There I worked on an interdisciplinary research project on the neuroscience of C. elegans involving machine learning, data science, and mathematical modeling. During my Ph.D. work, I did a lot of programming, and at some point, I realized I enjoy software development the most. At the same time, I realized academia is not the right environment and decided to quit the Ph.D. program at IST.
I found my dream job at VisoTech, a software company involved in the energy market where I work as a software engineer since March 2019. VisoTech gave me what I would call as software engineering special forces training and I gained a lof of knowledge and skill there. I figured its time to learn something new and I pursued my passion for DevOps and joined voestalpine HPM DIGITAL SOLUTIONS as a DevOps Engineer. There I had the opportunity to experience what it is like to attempt a DevOps transformation in a large organization, which thought me a lot about patience. Ultimately my ambitions and hands on approach led me to join Bitpanda. A true FAANG style company. At Bitpanda we had a fenomenal DevOps setup, which further solidified my belief that its something that has a tremendous impact on developer productivity.
Having gained a lot of experience, I wanted to join an organization where decisions could be made fast and I could have a bigger impact. I joined a startup Raicoon in my first Staff Engineer role. However, joining startups has inherent risks which led me to find myself on the other side of a mass layoff. This motivated me to take some time, use my experience as a freelancer and try to deliver value where I can, keeping in mind a motto borrowed from Elon Musk. "Never optimize something that should not have been built in the first place".