TeleSoftas through the eyes of CTO Nerijus Eimanavi?ius

My journey at TeleSoftas started almost 13 years ago when I first found out about Algirdas and TeleSoftas from a friend. I got invited to meet Algirdas on a bus coming back from the Mobile Monday event and this conversation became the first ‘interview’.?

Algirdas asked what I was interested in, what I enjoyed, and how I currently spend my time. And so we agreed to meet for the second interview at TeleSoftas office. I only remember two of the questions Donatas Duchovskis asked me during the tech interview. “How does interrupt processing work?” was a hard question for me as I was a 3rd year student then, but KTU prepared me well to answer. “Do you speak English?” was the other question and when I started speaking English with Donatas, Algirdas joined in to listen which was very unexpected. The same day they offered me the Mobile Applications Developer position.?

The Importance of Wide Technological Background and Desire to Share Knowledge

TeleSoftas played just as important role in my career as my own abilities. The environment that the people at TeleSoftas created allowed me to satisfy my curiosity, grow, share my knowledge and help others overcome obstacles. "At TeleSoftas there is a variety of projects to work on so I had opportunities to build a wide profile which played a big role in me becoming a CTO." After starting as a Mobile App Developer soon I received an opportunity to strengthen my skills in web development. After that followed, REST API development tasks and an increasing need for delivery and change. This forced me to look for solutions that sustain flexibility. Then I found REST conventions, started writing automated tests and started reacting to clients’ change requests calmly and even enthusiastically.?

I wanted to share these personal discoveries with the TeleSoftas community, so I did - firstly, in personal conversations, later in groups where we investigated Agile Development principles. These activities reflect the other important qualities for a CTO - the desire and natural motivation to share knowledge with an aim to help others grow.

How Last 10 Years Paved the Way for Sustainable Software Development

I am glad that when I started working in IT, open-source solutions had already started to grow. I had a great source of tools that I could use to create value for business and also learn new concepts, for example Backwards Compatibility, which led to stable architecture ideas. I am pleased that at the beginning of my career, my Team Leads were Agile (even though they didn’t know it because the term was not popular yet). During the last decade DevOps culture, Continuous integration and delivery concepts were discovered and I was fascinated by them. Cloud computing, Containerization, Microservices Architecture made it possible to achieve even more flexibility and faster solution implementation. I remember discussing with colleagues whether by dividing code into smaller chunks (according to SOLID principles) we create unnecessary overhead because of using additional functions. Speed of development and giving value to the business was and is 1st priority. Clean code was one of the elements that facilitated software maintenance and development.

Flexibility and scalability was implemented, security and privacy - achieved. I grew in openness and transparency.?

You might be thinking “Why is he listing all this?” Because this is the beginning and part of the principles that make up Sustainable software design and development. The rest of the principles are still being explored and improved.

Sustainable Software Design Maximizes Social and Economic Benefits

Other than the three principles I’ve already listed, Sustainable Development has three more:

• Accessibility,?
• Energy efficiency and
• Resource efficiency.

Accessibility is one of the principles that is easier to achieve and encourages creating software so that it is accessible regardless of users’ physical abilities or disabilities. Although we easily forget it and place it in the ‘nice to have’ box, it is extremely important for the social aspect of software.

Energy efficiency and Resource efficiency are most often looked at in the context of software sustainability and indicate how much hardware resources are used, when and how. It is crucial to understand that we use resources to create software and also software uses them when it works. Implementation of these principles requires specialists with higher qualifications so they could properly consider how to invest resources economically.?

As a result, software created according to these principles emphasises minimizing negative impacts on the environment and maximizing social and economic benefits.?

In Software development we learn and change all the time. Languages change, practices improve and new dependencies come into the picture. I am excited to see this change in the IT industry and be able to explore and contribute to Sustainable Software Development at TeleSoftas.