Dreams come true, if you make them happen !

Grateful for being part of the amazing culture and the work environment that provides opportunities for both personal and professional growth. I am happy for the chance to be part of such an incredible team where my voice is not only heard but valued.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in an internal contest where we were asked to share our childhood dreams and how we managed to achieve them. This exercise made me reflect on my journey and the positive impact Stefanini EMEA has had on my life.

It's truly great to work for a company that celebrates its employees' successes and encourages them to dream big.

Let me share you my story

Back in 2005, when I was a young 14 years old rebel, riding BMX everyday, filming and photographing our stunts and dreaming big, I wanted what I have now and I dreamt of what I am now. The story is very long and very detailed, but I will try to keep it brief.

As a kid, as you can see in the screenshot below, I wanted to have my own company called High-GFX Designs and be a professional in IT services ( websites, webdesign), marketing, professional photographer and videographer. This is my first website I ever made, using Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver ( yes, it was that long ago ... Macromedia ).

This dream was born 18 years ago. A long and heavy path followed, dream was swept away from the concious mind and pushed into the subconcious because I started working in different areas as pizza chef, bartender in my early youth, and overall life happened. Later, in 2011 I had the chance to participate in an internship at Orange Romania and after it ended I got hired. On the interview, when asked by the manager, where do I see myself in 5 years, I don’t remember the action, whether I said or just thought it, but these words somehow got thrown to the universe: ?Taking your place” . Little did I know that if you say what you want, think it and believe it, it will happen. Later, I lost my parents at an early age, at 21 and I must say, I did not have time to be sad, I needed to focus, to become better, to make my mom proud, always. I became manager of that Orange Store in 3 years and successfully performed there for over 5 years until I felt like I needed a change because of a, let’s say, not the best culture. Change was into something similar, a bolt and screw distribution company hired me as a sales representative and I worked there for 2 years, obviously always meeting deadlines, always improving my skills, reading books about sales and overachieving sales targets. Again, culture was minimum despite of all the efforts I put in. While working there, I got married ( later I got divorced, but that’s another story ) and I gifted my now ex-wife a DSLR Canon camera because she wanted to take photos on trips.

She started using the camera less and less, and I started using it more and more. This is how my love for photography came back from 2005, and I started pursuing this professionally, started small with personal events, invested all my earnings in my personal development and equipment. I started my company ALPIX VISUAL STUDIO ( www.alpix.ro ) in 2019 ( remember the company name, it contains VISUAL STUDIO and it was named randomly, it was chosen by the clerk ). Starting 2020 I focused all my efforts into working mostly B2B, with businesses, doing product photography and commercial videos for them and I am proud to say what my clients say: I am one of the best creatives ( photo/video) in Tirgu-Mures for business oriented product photography and video production.

At the same time, in 2019 I quit my job as a Sales representative, and I applied to Stefanini, probably my best choice ever because it’s been only ?to the moon” since then. I got hired and started working as a Support Engineer on a project. My path was not very long here, as I barely got out of the training period and Covid19 hit the world and we were sent to work from home. In the first days of working from home Enik? Zs. László , the SDM presented me the opportunity to be part of a new project, a hard project, with limited knowledge base articles, limited procedures and permissions and so on …. I accepted and that’s how I got to learn more and more about O365. Many thanks to Cristian Vasile , Vlad Baraba? , Eugen Ciocea , Andrei Miroiu for offering me continuos support in learning about O365 because with their help I managed to become an O365 Support Engineer . And many thanks for Eugen Ciocea for supporting and helping me in my career path until present day.

I continously invested my personal time in learning about O365, all it’s bits, learning from everywhere I could: Percipio, LinkedIn Learn , Udemy , Pluralsight , Microsoft Learn . Of course, in parallel, I continuosly grew as a professional in my creative business.

After this project, I got promoted to be an O365 Engineer Level2 on a different project and that’s where everything changed. After my learning period with it’s ups and downs, I finally felt that I mastered most of the incident types and possible scenarios and by April 2021 it started to be programmatic for me, day in day out, I completed incidents and requests and that’s when it happened.

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On a night shift in the first half of April 2021, I started looking into how I could develop some kind of simple solution, a graphical user interface with a button to complete a task through PowerShell.

And then I looked to create another button, and another … I stayed day and night in front of the laptop, I finished my shift and stood another 8 hours learning on how to create X,Y,Z in PowerShell to automate tasks, how to connect different O365 modules together. I watched courses out of my free time, I tested, I wrote scripts.

I did all this day by day and my small pet project, became a ~9000 lines code written 100% in Notepad that was a solution to do 90% of the requests in the queue in 50% time. Basically what I built, reduced the completion time by approximately 50%.

Because of all the knowledge I’ve acquired in sales, all the books I read about sales, about persuasion, about psychology and about how to get what you want if you really want it. I asked for the opportunity to present my solution to team leaders, division leaders outside of the project. I was looking to be given a chance, an opportunity to become a developer. This step brought me the amazing role that I have now, which is Developer, I do mostly Azure Automations, looking for solutions to eliminate dull, repetitive tasks and on a continuous learning path Programming on .NET with C#.

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This is how I got to where I am now, to where I wanted to be since 2005, and to where the Universe pointed me to arrive at when I started my own company with the name ?ALPIX VISUAL STUDIO” . Visual Studio being the IDE I use for programming and Visual Studio Code for scripting in PowerShell.

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All these achievements and the long path was only possible with continuous learning, financial and timely sacrifice and never ever accepting to be 2nd or giving up. I can proudly say that I am where I wanted to be since I was a child. I will not stop here, I am learning everyday about software development and always improving my skills in the creative business.

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And yes, I am still doing both in parallel professionally and always with great results and efficiency, both photography/videography as a freelancer in my own company and my job at Stefanini. Because I am one of the lucky few, who have two childhood hobbies, that turned into jobs and I love doing both !

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Thanks for reading my story ! Hope it inspires more and more colleagues or anyone who might come across it.

Please note, that DREAMS COME TRUE IF YOU MAKE THEM HAPPEN !