Time for change! The team was stable, and with logical successor manager, so I finally decided to gain some experience in different areas. This was a huge change for me:- After 6 years as a manager, I became individual contributor again. I like both roles and I hope to be able to develop in the two areas, solving challenging org and tech problems.- After 15 years working with .NET, I started to gain experience in the JavaScript ecosystem.- After 10 years of working mostly on low-level native stuff, I now explore various web, cloud, and AI technologiesInitially I spent time in 3 different teams:- Fiddler, one of the most popular debugging tools on the planet, where I helped with the shaping of FiddlerCore as a product.- Fiddler Everywhere - the cross-platform successor of Fiddler, mainly gaining experience with JavaScript and some web UI frameworks- NativeChat - Progress' innovative chat bot solution, where I touched AI and cloud-native apps development.Currently I am helping to build a strong Bulgarian team for MOVEit Transfer, Progress' leading product in Managed File Transfer space.On the dark side, I am continuing to develop my managerial skills, and just finished an extensive 1.5-year Learning to LEAD managerial course from Harvard ManageMentor.

I became the fully fledged manager and tech lead of the Document Processing team. During these times, the team maintained and further developed strong work-hard/play-hard culture, delivering more than expected while actually having FUN.- WE built a team where friendship, performance, curiosity, and helping each other were truly valued. - One team deliverable, namely the Document Processing libraries, became integral part in most of the products in the Telerik portfolio, including Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET AJAX, WPF, WinForms, Xamarin, Sitefinity and Kendo UI.- I got extensive experience in hiring, interviewing, and onboarding new people, participating in ~40 interviews and successfully hiring and onboarding 5 new people for the team. - I helped with the professional development of the team members, some of which grow tremendously in the org or outside of it. I still like them and they like me.- I bit the bullet and tried public speaking, delivering 2 successful .NET lectures, one with >100 participants. - I became member of the .NET Foundation, with some small contributions to the .NET ecosystem itself, and registered .NET Foundation speaker.- I created two popular open-source Visual Studio extensions with more that 10K downloads.- I organized some epic team building events, ranging from exclusive team-only boutique team buildings, to multi-team gatherings with 50+ participants. Together we visited different spots in Bulgaria and Greece, did biking, skiing, camping, hiking, kayaking, whitewater rafting, snorkeling, or just lying together on the beach with a drink next to our pool villa. These had amazing effect on the teams, bonding them harder than any corporate-imposed values.

As a typical developer-became-team-lead guy I was having hard time adapting to my new role and responsibilities - but reading some books and going to some internal trainings did the job. I started to switch my mindset!The team was actually doing well, and then... we were acquired by Progress. It was super interesting experience, given me the opportunity to work for young and wild Bulgarian startup at the beginning, and for 40-year old publicly listed international enterprise at the end.

Continue working in the same team, I was important contributor for the further development of complex document-editing controls and libraries, supporting the most common document formats, like DOCX, RTF, XLSX, PDF and similar.

Together with an exceptional team, laid out the foundation of one of most complex control in the whole Telerik suite - Telerik RadRichTextBox for WPF/Silverligth, which is basically extremely configurable Microsoft Word clone in the browser, easy to integrate in the developer apps.

Participated in developing complex GIS system for Bulgarian Geodesy, Cartography and Cadaster Agency. Technologies used: .NET Framework, Windows Forms, ESRI ArcGIS, Oracle DB