Where I've been

I've been a Software Developer for a few years now, but the future still excites me — and I'm happy with where I am today.

After more than three years at Devbridge, it was time for a change. I joined the banking startup Railsr — a mostly back-end role focused on banking APIs.

I studied for the exam using a Pluralsight course and a fairly thick book on programming in C#.

The certificate itself doesn't unlock much, but I enjoyed the challenge and learned some new things about .NET and the C# language along the way.

After leaving Visma and finishing my studies, I joined Devbridge.

I already had some Software Developer experience when I arrived, so I was assigned to a project right away. The stack was familiar: .NET on the back end and Angular on the front.

Devbridge is a services company, building products for other enterprises. During my time there I worked on four different projects.

My last project was a .NET microservices system built with Domain-Driven Design. The one before that was a Node.js project — plenty of variety and different challenges along the way.

After the internship I joined Visma as a Junior Software Developer.

For most of those two years I worked on integrations between Visma's in-house systems.

I worked alone most of the time, which helped solidify my problem-solving skills. But it also got harder to improve without anyone pointing out what I was doing wrong, and there were stretches without enough work to pick up. The situation wasn't going to change soon, so I decided to move on.

After finishing my second year, I decided it was time for another internship — this time aimed at the Software Developer role.

I took the entrance test, passed, and got accepted for a Software Developer internship at Visma Lietuva.

I started alongside three other interns. The first two weeks were exercises focused on the fundamentals of programming.

When the internship ended, I stayed on and joined Visma Lietuva full-time.

I applied and got accepted to Baltnetos Komunikacijos — a company providing IT infrastructure and maintenance to other businesses. I assisted two engineers with their daily work.

I worked there for two months. I learned more about computers, picked up some maintenance tricks, and got a real feel for the day-to-day of an IT engineer.

But most of the tasks were dull and repetitive — usually ending in reinstalling an operating system. After thinking it over, I decided it wasn't something I wanted to pursue.

I did my Bachelor's in Informatics Engineering at Kaunas University of Technology over four years.

The first two years cover more general subjects: math, physics, philosophy, statistics, data structures. After that the tracks split and the specialization subjects begin.

From the first semester we started learning C++. The course began with the basics, but the pace was fast, so you had to stay attentive to keep up.

The next year brought Java and PHP across several subjects. We also took a databases course, learning about different database types, normalization, and building one from scratch.

In the third year we had cyber security and embedded systems modules. We also got free elective credits — I picked API programming and game development.

My bachelor's project was a problem-tracking system for IT engineers. It was web-based, built with Angular and Material UI on the front end and .NET on the API side.

I went to school in the nearest city — Rokiškis.

My grades were never perfect, but I never had bad ones either. I liked the sciences — informatics, math, physics — and also English and history. A second foreign language (Russian) was harder for me, and I never became proficient at it.

For the last two years of high school we had to choose subjects to specialize in. Most people struggled with the choice, but I already knew I wanted to study information technologies, so picking was easy.

Before finishing high school we had to choose and pass exams. I took five:

• Lithuanian language
• English language
• Informatics
• Math
• Physics

Informatics and Physics were my best results. After the exams I applied to university and got accepted by my first pick.

I grew up in a small village in Lithuania called Moškėnai. There are only a few houses there, and a forest just nearby.

I spent a lot of time outside or curled up at home reading books.