#MeetOurTeam – Daria

How did you get to know Cegal and how did you end up with us?

I knew several employees of Cegal long before I started working here myself. I had heard so much positive about the work culture, so when Vitaly Semenov told me that the company had established a frontend department, there was no doubt I wanted to work here. I submitted an application and through several interviews, I learned that my impression of the company and the people who work here was right.

What was it like joining Cegal?

Starting at Cegal was very pleasant and smooth sailing! Before I started, I was invited to a social event with my future colleagues – which was very nice and much appreciated. Once started, I was closely followed up by my manager Lisa Greenquist who would always help if I had any questions. And of course, it was a lot of fun to start at the same time as my good friend Ellina Ivleva!

Can you describe the start of your time at Cegal?

The start-up at Cegal was very agile because I continued the same project that I had worked on before. After I was introduced to the company, I was back on the project from day two. There were, of course, several briefing meetings later, but all this happened in parallel with the project.

Which technologies do you work with? How do you experience the opportunity to influence which technologies you get to work with and learn? 

I primarily work with frontend and thus typescript, Angular, HTML and CSS. In addition, I have some backend tasks that require Java and database knowledge.

Now, my project will be moved to Azure and I've spent some time getting familiar with cloud technology. Although I work with Angular on a daily basis, I really want to keep up to date with other frontend frameworks and I am encouraged to do so. Right now, I'm taking React courses to expand my expertise.

What’s really cool about Cegal SYSCO is that we get the opportunity to spend time on competence development and learning new things that may be relevant to future projects.

 Daria

How do you think the technology you’re working with will evolve over time?

System requirements in frontend development are ever higher, and more and more aspects of our lives are being digitized. Users expect fast and good solutions regardless of their complexity. Therefore, I think that the main focus should be on improving user interfaces that can achieve this, and thus on technologies that are most suitable for this.

How do you work today?

I work as a developer in a scrum team on a client project. Here, I work closely with the business side to understand users' needs and ensure that our solution meets their expectations. I don't have a mentor on the project, but we have a mentor program in the company. My tech mentor Vitaly Moshkov is always there for me if I need to discuss my professional development.

Have you set any goals for this year?

I want to challenge myself more on the UX/UI side of things. I love focusing on that little extra bit that takes the user experience from "good" to "top notch."

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I am very happy at Cegal and hope that in five years I will have a manager role in frontend and design.

The best thing about working at Cegal is that you are heard and that you get to manage your own professional development.

Daria

What is your favorite podcast?

I don’t listen to podcasts very often, as I prefer audiobooks. One of the books I've been listening to lately, which I can recommend, is Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. It’s about electoral architecture; designing something to carefully nudge people in a favorable direction, without limiting people's freedom of choice.

What interests do you have?

My interests are hiking, plants, dancing, great food, our dog Fry and board games. We have a pretty large collection of board games at home. My favorite game is Dune: Empire inspired by the Dune book series. What's great about board games is that you get a break from screens, and get quality time with friends instead.

Something not many people know about you?

I lived in Finland for two years, where I worked as a researcher and taught subjects at the University of Helsinki. After these two years I established in Norway, studied IT at the University of Oslo, and got a job as an IT consultant. I defended my PhD in Finland after I had moved to Norway. So the last part of my PhD I did "remote" alongside working as a consultant. My thesis is about fixed expressions and is called "Collocations on the way: How words come together in Russian".

I examined idioms (e.g. "let the cat out of the bag") and words that are often used together (e.g. "fresh air"), what characterizes them and how best to retrieve such expressions from large corpus of text using statistical methods. I have done my research as part of the project where we have developed a system for people studying languages. In addition, better insight into fixed expressions can help improve the quality of machine translation and search engines.