I’m the Chief Software Engineer here at Forward Force. I lead a cross-functional team of talented software engineers.

I started writing code in high school more than 20 years ago. I haven’t stopped ever since. I commit code almost every day of the year; that’s all verifiable in my GitHub history. I started programming as a hobby, which turned into a lifelong affair, and I can’t wait to see where tomorrow takes me.

I started with PHP; it was PHP3 back then. I used Dreamweaver as my first IDE and was fascinated by what I could create. Setting up the Apache server on my local machine was the hardest thing I had ever done at that time; I was afraid that one day it would break, and I won’t ever be able to recreate it. Today, I docker-compose up, and ta-da! After some years, I stumbled upon Zend Framework 1, which seemed like the greatest thing ever; then CodeIgniter, Zend Framework 2, Symfony, Zend Framework 3, and of course, Laravel. PHP has gone a long way; it is no longer the wild west of the Personal Home Page; it is now standard-driven, reliable, mature, and performant technology powering a good amount of the Internet. I never write a single line of PHP code without a debugger, var_dumps, and dds is not my style.

I also know a thing or two about JavaScript. When I started working with JavaScript professionally, the JavaScript world was owned by PrototypeJS and Scriptaculous; I think this was when JavaScript began making sense. Today, JavaScript is the only thing that truly lives in the future. We take it from the future, compile it down to something more realistic and run it. Always bet on JavaScript. I have seen and done it all – Backbone, Require, Angular, React, React Native, Vue, Electron, Node, you name it.

I have a passion for building mobile apps; I like Swift and SwiftUI; I never miss an opportunity to write some Swift and get a notification from the App Store that my app is “Ready for Sale”!

I also specialize in DevOps. I genuinely believe that if a good software engineer will be able to run and scale their primary language, whether that is PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, etc. I have spent hundreds, possibly thousands of hours configuring AWS products.

I started Forward Force in 2012 because I wasn’t happy. Before going on my own, I worked for various companies; check out my LinkedIn. I loved the work but hated the vibe; software development was a thankless job, so I decided to go on my own, and it worked! Once upon a time, I was alone, hacking away day in and day out. Today, I have a team of people sharing my vision of how to build digital products, I still hack away day in and day out, but I’ve got fantastic people beside me.

Over the years, we have worked with dozens of clients; it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, but it has always been successful. I met bright and bold clients, risk-takers, and hustlers, and I learned from every single one of them. I learned what to do and what not to do.

The most important lesson, though, is one of responsibility. We as software engineers are often given a carte-blanche, a blank check, the benefit of the doubt that we will make the right decisions, will do the right thing for both the product and its users, their privacy, and security; failure is not an option.

I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Florida Gulf Coast University.

If you are curious, drop me a line at teodor@forwardforce.io.