Hi 👋 I’m Mefi aka Gábor Nádai, an Engineering Manager at Bitrise. This is my first English blog after 15 years of writing posts in my native language, Hungarian. I’m sharing my thoughts about remote teams, software engineering culture, soft skills, and leadership in general.
Work-related things
- 🤖 Currently at Bitrise, a mobile CI/CD company.
- 🤓 Engineering Manager on the Activation and the CoreSteps teams.
- 👨💻 Started my career in 2009 as a Software Engineer.
- 🤞 I was Tech Lead, Engineering Manager, and VP of Engineering before.
- 🏆 In 2018, I was awarded the “Young Leader of the Year” in Hungary.
Personal stuff
- 🌍 I love to travel.
I guess it’s a millennial thing. I traveled to 33 countries so far. - 📸 I love to take photos.
Smartphone, DSLR, drone, or analog, doesn’t matter as long as it has a lens. I have a Flickr with my favorite photos, mostly from traveling. - 🎟 I love theater, cinema, and music.
I’m mostly into the “artsy” kind of stuff. - 😸 I have two cats.
However, I wouldn’t consider myself a cat person. I really love all kinds of animals, I even had two turtles before. - 🎮 I’m into gaming.
Mostly filling the role of a n00b support in League of Legends, but my true favorites are GTA and Red Dead Redemption.
Nice mixture of both
I’m a night owl. This also means that most of the posts are written in the middle of the night. Sorry for the typos. I read a lot about this topic and I truly believe that it makes a huge difference if you can work and live by your chronotype. If you feel terrible for waking up early in the morning, don’t be, I’m with you.
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I have impostor syndrome. And while I’m freaking out because of it pretty frequently, I’m absolutely not ashamed of it. Furthermore: when I learned about it, I started to actively work on it. And since that, this helps me to freak out less and less. If you have impostor syndrome, then you should know, that this might be the first sign that you are actually doing a great job.
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I’m a soft skill enthusiast. Softs skills are actually hard. I rarely see software engineers finding it hard to solve challenging technical problems. But almost all the software engineers I worked with asked for my help in improving their soft skills. And honestly, I think all the time and effort invested in this has a huge reward.
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I talk a lot. And while it’s pretty hand multiple times, it could cause troubles as well. Being able to listen is a diamond-level skill, and I’m always trying to practice it. I really like to share thoughts, collaborate and help others. Writing and public speaking is a really a natural thing for me. However, I’m new to do these things in English. So this blog has some practicing purposes.
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My values
I am all about culture and values. When I start to work with someone, I try to share the most important things. These are driving how I work, what I expect from others and also that in which environment I feel good and productive.
- People first: my most important focus is psychological safety and helping others. You can build amazing things with happy, motivated, informed, and productive people.
- Transparency & honesty: is my default way of working. I always share what I truly think, even if I’ll be unpopular. While this resulted in some unpleasant situations, it also helped me a lot in my career.
- Responsibility & accountability: I like the concept that we can share responsibility but we cannot share accountability. I always try to separate these two and identify who is responsible and who is accountable for something.
- Everyone is doing their best: and I really never suspect a hidden agenda. I always assume that you’re very good at your job and doing your best.
- Questions, challenging, and speaking up: are essentials in building great teams and trust between each other. I do these quite frequently and I also encourage everyone to ask questions, challenge the status quo, and speak up.
Let’s have a coffee!
I’m happy to meet new people. If you need any kind of help in your career, you find any of my post interesting, or even the complete opposite: let’s have a virtual or real-world coffee.
You can reach me on Twitter or you can send an e-mail:
Thanks for reading this. While I mention my current or former companies sometimes, I never share any info related to someone specifically. If I don’t explicitly mention someone, it is most likely a non-existing person made of the memories of various other people. Opinions here are my very own (and could be totally wrong). I don’t want to offend anyone, yet if you feel that I somehow managed it, please let me know.