Hello Farnaz, it is a real pleasure to have you here today!
Please, tell us a little bit about yourself:
Hello everyone!
My name is Farnaz Bagheri, I am 34 years old, and I am originally from Tehran, Iran.
I have been living in the Netherlands for less than a year now, so you can say I am brand new around here!
I graduated with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electronic engineering, and I specialized in digital electronics.
On the professional side, I have been working as a .NET programmer for almost 7 years. Many people ask me why I moved from hardware to software, so this is a good chance to tell this story!
When I was younger, I was extremely interested in electronics and robotics, which is why I chose the field of electronic engineering. My master’s thesis was about a field that I really love, artificial intelligence; my master’s thesis explored the interaction between AI and transportation, specifically smart cars; and it was implemented on FPGA.
The goal was to find different ways to avoid collisions with pedestrians. As you can imagine, this is one of the key features of this technology.
This really intertwined with my passion for sci-fi movies, where AI is a recurring theme, especially when related to the safety of human beings. Needless to say, my favorite author is Isaac Asimov!
After completing my academic career, I had my first work experience at Adonis, where I worked with banking-related technology. At first, I was recruited by the company as an electronic engineer. Mostly, I was working on the hardware part and used to program ARM and other microcontrollers.
By pure chance, a software project was offered to me, and after a while, I realized that I was fond of IT, especially programming. After this experience, I attended many courses and changed my field of expertise to IT as I started writing ATM and other self-receipt programs for the banking industry. To be more precise, my assignment was software that was designed to record and analyze footage of ATM users. The end goal was to ensure that the people using the ATM did not steal the cards from someone else.
This was a great start for me. I had the chance to learn directly from other professionals, and after only two years, I joined the biggest payment service provider (SPS) in Iran, SEP, where I implemented banking services such as money transfers and buyer charges.
This field is incredibly challenging due to the sensitivity of the data and diversity of the tasks at hand. For me it was an incredibly good learning opportunity: I worked in parallel on several python based artificial intelligence projects. We used this technology to gather information from ID documents during the creation of new accounts and during authentication processes.
We also used AI to automate our call centers, especially to rate the voices of the operators. This was quite a unique experience for me, and it really makes me proud to have been involved in SEP’s projects.
After four years, I felt eager to work in international environments, so I planned to leave my home country to have new experiences.
After evaluating different countries, I chose the Netherlands since it is a well-known environment in the field of IT advancement. On a quality-of-life side, the Netherlands is one of the most advanced countries in the world, with high social welfare standards. So, I went for that!
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This is indeed a remarkable experience!
Could you please tell us how your life in the Netherlands has been so far?
Living in the Netherlands is a wonderful experience for me!
It is a beautiful country with both a rich culture and fascinating nature. In the Netherlands, there is a lot of peace of mind for everyone and this makes it a wonderful place to live. Dutch people are truly kind and supportive and very direct, as they like to describe themselves.
Compared to Iran, the opportunities, and the freedom that an individual has here are like day and night. You can do what you want, find your talents, and have many opportunities to make those talents bloom.
One of the drawbacks I can highlight is the food, but luckily there are several Iranian restaurants around the country, so when I feel nostalgic, I can always pass by and feel a bit at home.
Furthermore, since in Tehran we do not have a lot of rain, I am really enjoying the Dutch rainy weather!
What is the most valuable thing you have learned on your current assignment?
Currently, I am working as a full stack developer at MM Guide, and I am involved in three different projects: two are focused on the realization of an educational platform and they are led by Luciano, while the other is dedicated to hotel decoration design and it was created to allow our clients to easily decorate a space by selecting different items from a database.
I work on both, back-end and front-end, even though I take care of the latter more often by using Angular. This technology in particular is very interesting for me since I never had a chance to use it before, and if you ask me, it is very good!
I have perfect teammates who I enjoy working with. Actually, I would like to take this chance to thank Luciano, Boris, and Israel for their cooperation and support. I am really proud of us!
What is it that you enjoy the most in your work?
This is a good question!
Let me see… When you are a programmer, you face different projects every day, and this is incredibly challenging especially because you are far from a routine job and this aspect is very interesting to me. Furthermore, you can see the results of your work directly in the applications you are contributing to creating and this is delightful for me!
When you work with hardware you can expect to work on the same component for months or even years. Software is a completely different world and I love it!
MM Guide, due to its consultancy nature, is involved in various projects and business and this is an awesome environment for me to learn and experience how to properly analyze and tackle new projects. This is one of the reasons why I chose to join MM Guide and I am very happy with my choice!
I think that if you want to improve quickly and steadily you should experience different businesses and different fields, in order to get a better overview of both issues and solutions. This might be challenging, but this is for sure the best way to grow.
I should also mention that to carry out our current projects we are using cutting-edge technologies, which is both very exciting and very educational.
What motivates you and what are your career aspirations?
My greatest ambition is to become a software architect.
I am fond of programming and would like to take this passion to the highest levels.
Sometimes I have some ideas and I think I should start my own startup, but for now, I know I am not ready for it, and I should focus more on improving my technical skills. My biggest dream would be to contribute to the field of AI; I have a lot of ideas; I just need to wait for the right time!
What do you think will be the future of this industry, especially of AI?
If I have to look at the hit of these days, I cannot avoid mentioning Chat GPT: it can answer every question, it is a very strong software and it works on so many levels that for me it is simply amazing. I think it can really help people to improve their work and help us to deliver faster, and at the same time, I am 100% positive that it will not replace humans, at least not in this form.
I think the future will reflect what many authors predicted in their novels many years ago. I cannot tell if we are trying to emulate this vision of their prediction being fully accurate in the first place. Nevertheless, the future of this technology is going in several directions, many of which are new, but already rooted in the imagination.
