Alexander has years of experience in the software industry behind him, but his enthusiasm towards the software industry is still going strong. Learn more about Alexander’s career path, his proficiency with programming languages, projects and what motivates him at work.
Senior Software Developer Alexander Gudzovskiy’s career as a software developer began at the turn of the millennium. Writing code captivated him right from the start.
“I think my career began with a school project I did in 2001. It was the first program that actually went into use. After my studies, I continued straight to work.”
Software developers who have a long and varied career in the industry often have skills in a wide range of programming languages – and it’s no different for Alexander. He has years of experience with C++ and VB6, among others. More recent languages include C#, JS, TypeScript, PowerShell, SQL, HTML and CSS.
“I currently work primarily with C#, but I also use JavaScript, TypeScript and PowerShell at work.”
Alexander is also familiar with Windows Forms, WPF and WCF frameworks. His years spent working with software development can also be seen in his expertise on the technology side of things.
“Aside from the basics, I can also work with Amazon Web Service and various SQL databases. I also have experience with Oracle.”
Alexander’s career has focused strongly on software development to meet the needs of the medical and military industry. He has also worked on software development projects for the banking and insurance industries. Most of his projects have related to hardware interaction, but Alexander has also had desktop applications and services and distributed information systems land in his inbox. For the military, Alexander worked on hardware and video test stands and R&D UI applications which included intensive interaction with hardware.
“The software development teams were mostly small, and in some of the subprojects I was the only software developer. I also supervised and managed some junior developers.”
After working for the military for eight years, Alexander decided to leave in search of new challenges. Alexander believes that it’s worth transitioning to a new project when the current one no longer contributes to the professional development.
“I need to learn new things in my work, whether that’s through new tasks or projects. You can also learn new things by working with more experienced colleagues.”
He found his next job via an outsourcing company and began working for an American insurance company. Members of the project’s medium-sized team worked from US and from Russia. The company was using a large and aging enterprise application with a relatively complicated backend, frontend, and database.
“In this project, we maintained and supported enterprise-grade web application. We mostly fixed bugs and investigated customers’ complaints. Additionally, the project’s backend was rewritten when the transition was made from legacy technologies, such as Visual Basic, to the modern .Net implementation.
Alexander gained most of his work experience abroad. After moving to Finland, Alexander started work at Thermo Fisher Scientific on a medical device project.
“At first, I acted as a senior software developer working with software and control systems for interfacing the control software with the instrument medical hardware. Later, I became a junior architect working on simplifying and streaming the overall software design making it more robust and easier to maintain.
At Thermo Fisher Scientific, Alexander worked in a large, cross-disciplinary and international team ranging from scientist to developers. The software team alone comprised more than 15 people, while the project itself involved hundreds.
As a medical device, the project’s software development process was precisely specified, and development work had to comply with certain requirements in order to guarantee safety.
“In medical projects, there are certain established processes and regulations that must be followed or the software won’t be accepted as compliant in the European Union or the United States. I worked with the local team to make sure their software practices were documented, tracked and met the required quality requirements.”
Alexander came to Softability from Thermo Fisher Scientific. After arriving at Softability, he continued to work on Thermo Fisher Scientific’s projects – but this time as a consultant.
In his current project, Alexander is making a desktop application to support scientific feature detection algorithms and decision-making. The project itself deals with complex algorithms and fit-for-purpose visualization designed with east of use and human factors such that the user can work as efficient as possible.
Working with scientistic software developers at Thermo fisher scientific has helped Alexander learn a complex domain and the key factors important in feature detection in 3-dimensional data. In addition, with his addition colleagues from Softability, he has also helped orchestrate the underlying data structure need to power a high performing user interface.
This current project has lasted for over a year. Alexander is acting as the leading software developer for the project and is involved in all aspects from application design to user interface components.
“This latest project is nice because it was a green field project and I and the team were able to start it from scratch and do it correctly from the start. We had great visibility and direction for the project and had a clear objective to work towards. As a research project we using the latest technologies available, which makes work even more enjoyable.”
While working at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Alexander’s subprojects also included developing an R&D tool for generating PDF summary reports for non-scientists to read and understand. Making this fast and easy to comprehend was critical for adoption and the customer feedback from this work was overwhelmingly positive.
In addition, he worked on globally distributed laboratory Information system (LIMS). The project was implemented using variety of Amazon Web Services (AWS), C# and React with Typescript, and the finishing touches are currently being added to the multi-national, multi-site deployment.
Alexander specializes in full stack Microsoft .Net (Core and Framework), WPF, SQL, React with Typescript and AWS code bases and some DevOps.
Alexander’s interest, motivation and enthusiasm towards the software industry are still going strong. What about software development still excites him after all these years?
“There is often a real need for projects relating to hardware, and software development that meets a real-world need motivates me. Modern technology is not just motivating; it’s also rather essential for high quality work.”
In his work, Alexander pays attention to detail and is thorough with regard to what is doing at any given time.
“I always try to understand the problem and come up with the best possible solution, even if it requires hard work. I want to reduce the possibility of mistakes: the code should always be the best possible. It is unacceptable for code to be messy because you wanted to save time or were lazy.”
Alexander enthusiastically reads industry literature and actively follows events in the software development industry. He is delighted that there is high-quality material and information available on how to further improve software development.
“I recommend reading the books, as lots of effort has gone into them. The books I read don’t really focus on a single language or technology. Instead, they deal with the general approach and patterns that should be used and how software should be developed.”
Alexander says that he is entirely satisfied with his work as a consultant. It has provided him with the opportunity to develop his skills with various technologies and software systems without needing to change jobs.
During his career, Alexander has worked remotely on many projects without a software development team, which is rather unusual for a software developer.
“Perhaps it’s something to do with my personality, but working alone suits me. When I work in a team, good communication is the key to a high-quality result. Information must be shared, and you cannot be too firm in your own opinions.”
What are Alexander’s plans for the future?
“I’ve enjoyed myself at Softability for eighteen months, and I have no intentions of leaving,” he concludes.
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