“At TahDah, we get along, and we tend to bounce off each other with a lot of ideas”

The first members of the TahDah team at Questers started a couple of months ago and are already working at full speed. Even though they’ve been having busy schedules, we’ve managed to steal a couple of minutes from Dimitar Lazarov, a Senior .NET Developer, to share his first impressions of the company, its product and his new colleagues.

Tell us a bit about yourself, your educational and professional background?

I was born in Blagoevgrad, and after graduating high school, I came to Sofia to study Computer Science at Sofia University.

My professional career started 10 years ago when I was engaged in the development of a platform for training courses. Some of the projects that I worked on during the years include an online poker platform and a science platform, which aimed to help universities, individual scientists and other research bodies to share their discoveries with each other. The end goal of this platform was to help achieve 17 sustainable development goals set by the United Nations. And a couple of months ago, I joined the TahDah team at Questers.

Apart from the programming, almost two years ago, I founded my own company together with a group of friends. It is about personal life coaching, art and various other creative processes.

You were among the first team members in the TahDah team at Questers. Tell us more about your first few months in the company?

It was like a cultural exchange. Most UK colleagues are from Wales, which is wildly different from England. I learned a lot about their culture, and they, on the other hand, learned a lot about ours. I can say we got off on a pretty good start.

From the work perspective - the onboarding was simple yet effective. Jonathan, the Tech Lead, showed me the overall structure of the current product. Neil, the CEO, on the other hand, arranged an online tour around the user interface so that I could get familiar with what the end-user can expect from the TahDah’s website.

Share a bit more about TahDah? How would you describe the company and the people you are currently working with?

The company's product is geared towards organizations of professionals who require qualifications, courses and constant activity.

Imagine you are a capable mountain guide, and you want to apply for membership in a tourist organisation because that helps with your career. To do that, you have to prove that you are qualified in the first place. So, you either need to share your certificate or attend courses for it, pass the tests and receive it. But how the organisation and anyone who looks at your profile would know you didn’t fake it all? Here is where TahDah’s platform steps in. It provides the tools to track the training process, the scoring, the achievements and the activity of any professional.

Furthermore, for each earned certificate or achievement, TahDah issues an electronic badge that serves to prove the accomplishments of the individual to potential employers, associations and awarding bodies. The user essentially creates a digital resume for himself that is almost impossible to be faked.

Training providers can use the platform themselves because they can upload their course materials and manage their training programmes. In turn, the training providers’ courses can be promoted to relevant groups and individuals on TahDah’s platform.

Regarding the people at TahDah - they came from various professional backgrounds and you could learn a lot of new things from them. Our Tech Lead, Jonathan, for example, has nearly 30 years of developing experience and is a second-generation developer. And Aaron, our non-tech coach, has been on a submarine (although he is really modest about it).

From a technical perspective, what are the most challenging projects the company is working on?

TahDah has one big monolith that is deployed onto AWS via Azure DevOps. Currently, my main task is to isolate and extract any feature into an independent microservice. We are migrating towards AWS at the moment, so the main challenge is to get familiar with the new technologies.

What’s the tech stack currently used in TahDah?

For the back-end, we use .NET 6.0 and many AWS services, such as DynamoDB, Lambda functions, Step Functions, Event Bridge, (soon) DynamoDB streams and Quantum Ledger, and others.

For the front-end, we use React, but we have a dedicated front-end developer, so I personally don't work with it a lot.

Why is TahDah a great place to work?

Mainly because we are a great team. We get along, and we tend to bounce off each other with a lot of ideas. The team in Bulgaria is TahDah’s first expansion to a foreign country, and although it is something new to them, they are very open to it and adjust very fast. All in all, the atmosphere is friendly and the communication - warm and lively.