Paul Fioravanti
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Please introduce yourself
I am a software developer and consultant with 15 years of industry experience, traversing the technical career stack from coding to professional services to pre-sales across Australia and Japan.
What do you do for work?
I work as a Principal Consultant for Alembic, a boutique consultancy that loves creating awesome software. We have a particular affection for Elixir, TypeScript, and GraphQL, but run the gamut of all sorts of web-based tech stacks in our projects (and love them all the same).
What do you do outside work?
I enjoy enabling coders to communicate and am currently the organiser of the Elixir Sydney, GraphQL Sydney, and Elm Sydney meetups.
My most recent passions are stenography (writing shorthand on a keyboard, like a court reporter), technical blogging (at paulfioravanti.com), mechanical keyboards, and running (good podcast catch-up time).
Toughest work moment?
When I was a junior developer in Tokyo, I completely flubbed a customer demo due to a lack of preparation, technical problems, communication limitations, and just plain bad luck. I could tell I had embarrassed my team and ended up escaping to a park, sobbing to my partner on the phone, questioning my career and every decision I had ever made that got me to this point.
Imposter syndrome, unfortunately, never really goes away, but we keep a truce of sorts these days.
Most rewarding work moment?
When a junior colleague first said to me that when they got assigned a problem one day, they asked themselves "What would Paul do?". It was very humbling to be told by someone else that your words and actions have enough value to be worth remembering.
Being able to then see how those words and actions are riffed on and remixed into something that is completely their own, yet still contains familiar echoes, is also really satisfying.
Your 'one sentence' work-related advice
Be the person you would love to be mentored by.
Connect with Paul on LinkedIn.
