Meet Yoana Ivanova, Engineering Team Lead at Progress

We’d like to introduce you to some of the people from around the world who make us who we are at Progress. In this post, meet Yoana Ivanova, team lead for Blazor, based in our office in Bulgaria.

Yoana has been with Progress for more than eight years and credits her personal and professional development to the company, but mostly to her colleagues. A nature lover, who is all about self-improvement and is always up for a mental or physical challenge, she is part of the team making tech history by developing the first-ever native application development components for Microsoft Blazor. Here’s her story:

How did you decide to pursue a career in technology? How did Progress come in the picture?

Technology has always been around me one way or another since my mom is a developer. If you think that she is the one who pushed me towards software engineering, you are wrong. Not only didn’t my parents encourage me to pursue a career in technology and science, but also, they strongly encouraged me to focus on foreign languages in high school. At university, I majored in management and economics and was fascinated by the correlation between math and computer science. To explore it further, I enrolled at Telerik Academy, a well-known training initiative, and that’s how my journey in software engineering began.

As for Progress, it’s always been the best place to work for me. Even before joining the company, I knew I wanted to work either for Progress or nowhere else, and I don’t regret my decision even a little bit.

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You’ve been with Progress for eight years now and it seems you are as excited as on day one with us. Tell us more about what makes Progress such a good employer for you?

I love the atmosphere here, the challenges, the opportunity to work on industry-first technology and the amazing people I am surrounded by. Progress offers many opportunities for career development and the managers here are great at supporting employees to follow their professional interests and move forward. Since I joined the company, I’ve had the opportunity to shift several times the focus on my career—I started as a QA engineer, then transitioned to software development and today I am a team lead.

Here are some of the talented software engineers on the Blazor team at Progress.

You are part of the team developing the Progress native components for Microsoft Blazor. What’s it like working with such a new technology?

The best part of that is that you are building a product from scratch. You are seeing how it’s evolving and turning into something much bigger. Also, when something is in its experimental stage as is Blazor, it is constantly changing, and you have to adapt fast. Working closely with Microsoft, we are learning a lot and seeing that our work has a real impact on the development of the framework itself. Something I’ve never experienced before.

Is there something—maybe an approach or a perspective—that you’ve taken from software engineering and transferred into your personal life?

Interesting question. I love organizing the work process and this is something I also apply to my personal life. Few people know that actually I am an organizational freak. If there’s a home improvement project coming up, I would create a board with tasks, deadlines and roles. Some people find it odd, but I like seeing everything laid out and what my next steps are.

I also enjoy organizing events and gatherings. I already have a spreadsheet prepared with ideas for team-building adventures for my colleagues, once it’s safe to do so.

Being such an organized person makes us think you are quite busy. What do you do outside work?

I love playing pool—I’ve even participated in several amateur tournaments. I also enjoy climbing mountain peaks, practicing Bulgarian folklore dances and racing with ATVs and go-karts. I even went to drifting school to learn how to pilot different cars.

To get to know other Progressers like Yoana, read more of our Progress employee interviews here.

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