# About me

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/about/
- Published: 2015-12-16T13:04:27+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

I am a product engineer with a degree in communication and a decade of practice 
in advertising. That makes me a very good systems designer. I strive to deliver 
simple, synergetic systems. That is what I have done for the past 25 years, and 
got better at it as the difficulty of the problems I solved increased and the amount
of problems I caused added up.

Systems design is many times more about experience than about skills. Of course 
great skills will help to design better systems, but great experience has more impact.
I think this is because systems design benefits more from synthesis than analysis.

Some bigger systems I’ve designed, whole or in part:

 * a big enterprise CMS
 * a web builder that made money
 * a system for digital transformation of paper assets
 * a workflow management system
 * an indexer, search and suggestion service for news
 * a patent infringement search engine
 * a very complex system for monitoring outdoor media countrywide
 * an e-commerce platform

These are highlights of eighteen years and as you see they are not so many. None
are world renown brands, never had that opportunity, however they all are some order
of magnitude above typical projects. Between or along with all the projects above,
countless other smaller systems fill in the space of my work experience, systems
for people management, for scrum adoption, for code review, for enterprise resource
management, software or paper trails like feasibility studies, business cases, which
are systems on their own.

And then there are the blunders. From all the blunders there are a few highlights:

 * two failed startups, one failed because of a behemoth (Google) took over the 
   market, another one failed because of cash flow problems (and me being too young
   to understand cash flow, another item where experience makes more of a difference
   than theory)
 * a failed video streaming service
 * a failed group discount e-commerce product
 * a failed price comparison system

Blunders are good. The Buddhist teaching of seeing the glass as already broken is
good in helping one grasp that all things eventually break. This perspective allows
one to be prepared when things break, not shocked, not panicked, but prepared to
make things right again.

That is why I prefer simple synergetic systems. 

There are also some technical feats which I am proud of:

 * an algorithm for article extraction from webpages
 * an article similarity algorithm
 * a design pattern called Request Template Objects, which I have created and used
   to make my own framework, which is not used by anyone but me, yet it was a great
   opportunity to learn
 * an end to end video conversion system
 * a poor man’s javascript bundler with routing before jQuery existed

Subjective things you should know: what you get with me is a great amount of intuition
and clarity. I do not over-engineer. I curb my enthusiasm more often than not, and
when I don’t there usually is a good reason for it. I pivot very often before I 
fail. I am told that I’m a good explainer and I truly enjoy relaying information.

Sounds interesting? Drop me a line: hello [at] andreidraganescu [dot] info