You can actually ace it here

I really liked sports, ever since I was a kid. I considered school to be “my job” at that time and I was doing a great job there (no pun intended), but I also was really good at mixing school with my hobbies. I started with football and continued with handball, basketball, volleyball and then athletics. I’ve been a professional athlete for 6 years, with amazing results in the 3000m speed races. I then moved to Cluj to study telecommunications and that’s when my love for tennis started. Tennis is about equilibrium: force versus precision or spin versus speed. It’s about one single moment that can change everything. I have been playing tennis for 10 years now in competitions all over Romania, and I also mix this with travelling, which is another hobby that I hold dear.

Just like in tennis, I start my work day with a warmup, coming to the office on my bike and then continuing to read my e-mails with a good coffee. What a great start. The scrum master ending our daily meeting with all things planned ahead for the day is an analogy to the referee in tennis saying we have “2 minutes of warm-up left”. The “match” starts right after: translating specifications in code and classes, words in components or digits, the client’s requirements into actual deliverables. What I love most about my job is that I can solve problems, and not just the coding ones, but also those kind of issues that eventually help my team achieve the expected results. In tennis the score may change in your favor, or it may not, it’s the same at work where an easy task can become the most difficult one. Wonder how I handle it? I adapt, I prioritize, I deal with it and win over it. At the end of the day, what I am actually doing is trying to win the match and if not… then tomorrow is a new day with another IT retrospective.

Time flies when I do the things I love. I can play tennis 6h a day or I can equally get really absorbed in the code, that I forget that my work schedule has already finished. As a life rule, I think that the balance between job and hobbies is really important. Life itself is about balance: the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, the winnings and defeats. All that matters is the lessons you learn along the way and always keep the equilibrium between the mind & the heart.