About Me

Hello! I'm Stefan Paduraru. 👋

I'm currently working as a Head of Engineering at Arbio.

I enjoy everything tech, just as much as building up teams and people.

I've been around for a while

I started studying how to write code in high school in 1999. In the beginning it was Turbo Pascal, but I moved on to C and C++ after a while. I also dabled in Linux bash script. During my high school years I really enjoyed modelling in 3ds max, writing in 3d script as well. Unfortunately I didn't have much of an eye for it.

I studied Computer Science between 2003 and 2008 at the Technical University of Iasi, Romania. I enjoyed diving deeper into maths, software and hardware.

I started my career as a developer in 2005 working as a freelancer, crafting web pages in PHP, for various people from around the world. What a time! Anything went! I remember writing two versions of CSS: one for every browser, one for IE6. It was rough, but we didn't know any better.

After a few years I moved on to working for different local software companies. I worked mostly in PHP and Java, but also dabbled in Visual Basic and more advanced Javascript.

In 2011 I decided I wanted to study some more, eyeing putting some eggs in a different basket, so I enrolled at the Maritime Academy of Constanta. I studied for 4 years, and finished with a degree in maritime navigation. It was fun, learning how ships are made and piloted, how to navigate by stars, how to go into ports, all the visual and acoustic signals. Not the mention how fun the simulators were.

I've continued my journey into technical development and leadership until 2018 with a number of full-stack developer and engineering manager roles at different companies.

In 2018, I decided to leave Romania and move to Berlin. I got a job at a marketplace as a senior developer. I started getting more into nodejs, react and cloud. Right before the pandemic started, in March 2020, I moved to Moonfare, a promising fintech business. I got on board as a senior dev, but quickly went into management, leading the inventory team, although I stayed hands-on for most of the time. It was a lot of fun, I worked with a lot of smart people and I learned a lot as well. I stayed with the company for almost 3 years, developing the most performing team, improving existing functionality and releasing new products.

At the start of 2023 I decided to take my learnings and my potential, and have a crack at building a platform and an organisation from scratch. I got this opportunity with Arbio, a prop-tech company backed by Atlantic Labs. I was hands-on for my entire time at Arbio, building the entire platform by myself early on (infrastructure, db, backend, various front-end clients, mciro-services, automations etc). I also got the chance to run the product function, ellaborating the OKRs and setting up the short and mid-term strategy for Product & Engineering. Over time I got the chance to hire more people and form teams to speed up the development efforts. It was a great time, I learned a lot and delivered even more.

Failed dreams

Life also throws you curveballs sometimes, perhaps when you're the happiest.

In 2016, two years after finishing courses at the Naval Academy, I actually wanted to get into it professionally, and I got a cadetship with Norwegian Cruise Line. I was supposed to leave for Miami and get onboard a cruise ship that was doing a 7-day route in the Carribean, but I had a motorcycle accident a day before I was supposed to fly out of Bucharest.

Instead of basking the Carribean sun, learning all there is to it about the cruise line industry, I found myself on a hospital bed in Bucharest. I had a severly broken wrist that needed 3 surgeries to fix. I had to do a year of recovery to get back most of the functionality in my right wrist, basically learning how to use my hand again. All the things I was enjoying at the time (writing code, playing the drums, playing basketball, doing crossfit), I had to stop without a notice. Those were tough times!

Thankfully, I managed to recover most of the functionality and strength in my wrist.

But I gave up on riding the high seas, and got back to my first love, tech.

Bending lights and colours

Around 2016 I started playing with a Raspberry PI and some ws2812 leds.

I stuck with it, and over time have built quite a few smart lamps around the house. I have developed a platform written in Python that I can easily deploy on a RPI and quickly create smart lights that connect to my phone or to Home Assistant.

I enjoy the challenge of creating visually appealing objects that enhance my environment. I like working with various materials: from 3d printed materials, to glass, brass, and cement.

And I enjoy the process: from having an obscure idea and mulling over it in my mind, sketching it and developing it, to continue iterating over an extended period of time until I feel it's complete. It brings me a lot of joy! I'd love to do this for a living one day.

IRL

Outside of work you'll find me spending time with my beautiful girlfriend Carla Haratau and our dog, JoJo.