#ITProsWhoCare Spotlight —@Abesto from @Prezi
Welcome to our ITProsWhoCare Spotlight series. This is an ongoing collection of posts that features members of our Community.
In our last release we learnt about Greg and his vision to tech volunteering.
In this release please meet Abesto from PREZI — who just loves cats!
Without further ado and a big drum roll to another member of #ITProsWhoCare, here is his interview with us:
#charity: What gets you up in the morning? What is your life motto?
Abesto: I share a sentiment with many of my peers: my work is pretty much what I’d be doing in my free time, except some people pay me to do it. I get unreasonably excited about all kinds of software-related challenges and learning about the tiny details that make things break (or sometimes work, but mostly just break). When we manage to build software that eventually helps people achieve great goals better, faster, smarter, that’s when I feel most successful. If I had a motto, it’d go something like this: Build awesome stuff. Never waste anyone’s time (including your own). Tsuyoku Naritai.
#charity: Describe the world you want your children to grow up in.
Abesto: A society that supports each person to explore and realize their talents. A culture with constant open conversations about shared values.
#charity: What skills are you offering to the #charity NGOs?
Abesto: I consider myself a generalist web developer, meaning that if a technology is related to the web somehow, then there’s a good chance I’ve played with it. I know my way around front-end technologies — but I couldn’t design a delightful web-page if my life depended on it. My main area of expertise is planning, building and maintaining highly reliable backend systems and their APIs, plus the tooling around them: the development environment, monitoring, continuous integration and deployment.
#charity: Why are you here? What motivated you to support the #charity community?
Abesto: It’s basically a bunch of happy coincidences. For a while before #charity was conceived I’ve already been thinking about what I, personally, could do for the proverbial greater good. I’m also constantly looking for interesting software projects to contribute to — so far these have mostly been open-source tools. Given these goals, #charity is just too good to ignore.
#charity: Tell us a little about yourself. What’s your story? What was a truly life transforming or meaningful moment in your life so far?
Abesto: I distinctly remember a fun little realization, happened when I was maybe 15 years old. I was what you’d call the local geek, the person who just knew computers. That image fitted the image I had of myself pretty well but then I realized: I still hadn’t written a single piece of software I could be proud of. That’s when I started intensely learning everything software-related I could get my hands on. Thanks to the Internet, that happens to be quite a lot.
Another major moment was when I was approached to work with Prezi. The mission statement and really the whole culture of the company helped me realize that I can directly use my experience to have a positive impact on “the world”. Also, it eventually lead to me joining #charity ☺
#charity: Where did you learn about #charity?
Abesto: From the post where Czapo announced the project on a company-wide forum. That post got several Prezi engineers on board with #charity.
#charity: Anything else you want to leave the #charity community with?
Abesto: I’m looking forward to working with you all. Don’t forget, this is on the Internet, and everything on the Internet has cats. Everything is better with cats.
(source: http://cheezburger.com/8231459072)
You can tweet (@abesto) under #ITproAbesto this week for questions, to meet him locally if you are around or just to say hi ☺
Do you think you have many things in common with Abesto? Join at hashtagcharity.org and help us build further the Community of One Million ITProsWhoCare!
