#MeetTheTeamMonday: Meet Marko
A career in technology
Marko Samastur, Chief Technical Officer.
I am really excited to see many talented students taking part in our STEM #FuturesUP event later on today at Google’s offices. So, I wanted to share how I first got involved in the tech world….
I wanted to have a computer since I first saw one and it took me 4 years to persuade my parents that this was not just another passing interest. I loved creating new things such as LEGO buildings and dresses for my sister’s dolls; computers offered seemingly endless possibilities.
I became a software developer because programming was something I could enjoy doing while figuring out what I really wanted to do in my life. I remained one because this career offered me opportunities to see the world, work with people from all walks of life on interesting challenges and most importantly to me, have a positive impact. One such project that I am really proud of, happened almost by accident.
Years ago, as I was taking some time off to travel and think about what to do next, a friend of mine asked me to help with a small project that needed to be done quickly. He was helping the anti-corruption commission in Slovenia at the time and persuaded them to give us access to the data available to them in exchange for coming up with an interesting application for it.
We spent the next 3 weeks coming up with ideas and testing the most promising ones in our prototype which soon started to look like a potentially useful application. We didn’t know what others would find useful, so we built something that was useful to us which was a web application for reviewing in detail how the government spent money and which organisations were beneficiaries. It was not the kind of application many would dream of making but we were curious enough and thought something like it was vital to have for a healthy democracy.
We thought that once it was launched either nobody would care or it will be wildly popular. It turned out that we were not the only ones who cared! Our programme, Supervizor, was widely used, especially among journalists, and we even won a UN Public Service award for it!
I believe that we will never run out of problems we can alleviate and solve with the help of technology and I am as eager to work on some of them today as I was when I started.
