About Me

Hi there, my name is Dzevdet, and I am a software developer. As my experience piled up, in June 2016 I joined AgentLocator as CTO and took over the task of creating the new version of our platform as well as the task of creating our engineering team. Prior to that I was a developer in a outsourcing company for six years. In a hindsight that context switch was more complicated then I anticipated. Technical and organizational challenges were interesting and I learned a lot. I also wish I had found someone to mentor me in this journey as I often worked really hard instead of smart. That made me invest a lot of emotional energy and time to achieve results that are from this distance could be achieved faster and easier. With less stress for everyone involved 🙂

Having some time to reflect to this experience in the last six months I decided to share it and potentially help someone in the similar path.

A bit of additional context

At the moment of my joining the company, AgentLocator was 7 years old company that had formidable customer base and working platform that included CRM, CMS and belonging sites created through CMS and hosted. Most of the platform was developed by one person using at that time technology that was past its prime. The idea was to create new version of the platform and move clients from existing to new product.

My experiences, decisions and actions were driven by the fact that we wanted to move users seamlessly to new platform, keep the old one running at the same time, had sufficient but not abundant resources, and I had zero experience doing this previously.

Coming from the outsourcing world I had understanding how to cater one big client and deliver code to the production, but I had no experience how to actually cater the product and users.