Magda Malinowska is one of two (!) people named Magda that make up the members of Team Fieldly. This Magda was born in Warsaw, a city she still calls home, and got her university degree in Mechatronics at the Warsaw University of Technology. Her Master’s thesis focused on eye-safe lasers and she spent one semester in Norway specializing in nanophotonics and solid state physics.
You might wonder how someone goes from studying the physical science of light (photonics) to developing software aimed at making life easier for construction companies? It’s not as far-fetched as it may at first seem.
As often is the case, good people attract good people. Fieldly CTO Tomasz was once a mentor for Magda in her early days of programming. She says she knows how he works and that the two of them have similar approaches to their work.
- I knew there was no way that a project Tomasz is leading would have bad code.
Meetings with our CTO gave her a positive impression of the Fieldly Team and what we wanted to achieve. Magda says it is important to her that the job she does fulfils real needs.
- I’d like to see every construction company use a project management tool built by us.
Tomasz wasn’t the only Fieldly member Magda knew prior to joining us. The other Magda, Magda Piechota, was a familiar name to her. She later learned that Mikolaj, a developer she admires and enjoys working with, was also joining the team.
Has Magda’s impression of Team Fieldly changed now that she knows her team mates better?
- I love the team! Everything I heard from Tomasz turned out to be true; Daniel is very positive and friendly and so are Sven and Lars. Grzesiek and Grzesiek* are also helpful, she says with a smile.
*the nicknames of two Team Fieldly developers named Grzegorz, ed. note
Magda started out as a Ruby on Rails developer which is also the area she feels most comfortable in. She has, however, also learnt some Javascript and is familiar with frameworks such as Angular2.
But what about the road from mechatronics and photonics to software development? What was it that made Magda make the leap from lasers to Ruby on Rails? To an outside spectator this journey is not crystal clear.
Perhaps a clue is to be drawn from her desire to learn new things. Apart from trying her hand at baseball and taking classes in both Judo and rock’n’roll, Magda took her first steps as a Ruby developer building a social networking website with some of her friends. This brought her to the Rails Girls Warsaw event which made her fall in love with the community spirit of programming. And the rest is, as the saying goes, history.
We are very happy she found her way to coding and us and look forward to the great achievements we know will come from her work on the Fieldly Team.
