We’re excited to welcome George Andrei to the growing LibLynx team, as our new Senior Backend Engineer!
As we scale as a company, we’ve also been busily growing our platform – especially in chunky domain-specific technical challenges, such as analytics data processing. George’s experience and talent in software engineering made him a standout choice to bolster our team.
To help introduce him to our LibLynx community, here are George’s thoughts on his joining our team and what he’s hoping to achieve.
Tell us a bit about yourself!
Other than software engineering, my biggest passion is music. I’m mostly into doom metal and breakcore, both of which I’ve been performing live for the past decade. I play drums, bass and perform with analog and digital machines. This gave me many opportunities to travel, mostly in Europe and Asia. I travel a lot and live in a camper with my dog for most of the year. Currently we are stopping in an olive tree grove in Catalunya.
Nowadays I still make a lot of music but don’t perform so often any more. Over the years I’ve learned to appreciate the calm of nature more than the chaos of a city. I found I’m more productive, creative and motivated when I am not distracted by the endless noise of the city. That surprised me initially, as I am originally from Bucharest, the capital of Romania, a big chaotic city. I always thought I would live in a city, but here I am spending Saturday evenings in my camping chair looking at the stars instead of the usual smoky rock bar.
How did you get involved in software engineering?
My dad bought a computer in the late 90s out of curiosity, as they were becoming more popular. At the time I was 5 years old. He asked me if I could copy documents for him from paper onto the computer, in the hope it would teach me to read. It did more than that – I quickly became fascinated with the device, and soon family friends started bringing me floppy disks with games or programs for me to try and install. Fast forward a few years I was setting up the machines of relatives with Windows XP (for a price!), getting rid of viruses, trading and selling games at school downloaded from the local area network. It became clear very early that this was the path I was going to pursue in life.
I went on to study Computer Science at high school, where I learned mostly C++ and SQL, then went on to study at the University of Sheffield, working part time as a PHP developer. This was the best choice I ever made – at the University I discovered the true complexity of this field, and was most passionate about Digital Signal Processing and Web Development. My part time job turned into a full time job, working for the University’s Digital Humanities research centre. I was fortunate to work alongside passionate and experienced colleagues, which helped me develop my skills at a rapid pace. We worked on a variety of projects, for example Linguistic DNA) and Digital Archivio Ricordi.
In my spare time I work on music technology related projects. Most recently I released a free application for DJs to extract individual track names from a recording of a DJ set (trackidspider), and my next goal is to start building audio plugins for producers.
Why did you join LibLynx?
I’m really excited about being at LibLynx – it’s a fantastic opportunity to grow at a fast pace, learning from industry veterans, and work on cool projects.
I’m loving the relaxed non corporate atmosphere, working with passionate colleagues, and the feeling that we’re all in this together, doing meaningful work that has real impact on the publishing and library industry.
I also hope to bring a boost of energy to the team, not just through engineering, but also through my energetic personality!