Hello! 👋

#story #learning #career #backenddevelopment

Here I am trying staring at the empty textbox, SO BIG AND EMPTY!

Daydreaming that what if, a famous biographer, can just write the intro for me? Sigh 😭

But it is now 2024 and I could achieve this by talking to my phone for an hour! So here are the results - check it out.

#nofilter * (added emojis, links and formatting)

Peter Csiba: From the Abstract to the Real

-- by W. Isaacson GPT

Chapter 1: Early Beginnings

Peter Csiba’s journey began in a small Slovakian village 🍓, where his supportive parents encouraged him to pursue his intellectual interests. They recognized his need for a better learning environment and enrolled him in a progressive school in Bratislava, despite the long daily school commute, quite unheard of in 1990s. There, he was introduced to programming in the second grade by an influential math teacher. Peter participated in math competitions from the third grade onward and excelled in them, but he never considered programming contests until his final year of high school. His math teacher came up one day:

Peter, why don't you try this programming contest? It is due by Friday.

Despite his limited experience, he performed exceptionally well. His success in the International Informatics Olympiad revealed a strong affinity for programming and helped guide his career path.

Chapter 2: University Years and Early Dissatisfaction

Following high school, Peter pursued both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science at Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave. While his undergraduate years were marked by camaraderie and theoretical rigor, the master's program was overly abstract. He stayed only to sharpen his practical programming skills, living in a dormitory on a meager budget of around $200 per month. He took on side projects as a Jira plugin developer to earn a little extra money 💰.

Despite the opportunities, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the limited scope of Slovakia’s tech landscape.

The most prominent technological company, ESET, had global recognition, but there was little else that compared to the allure of Silicon Valley. Frustrated with the slow pace and lack of cutting-edge projects, he longed for something more pioneering 🧭.

Chapter 3: Pursuing the American Dream

Peter looked west to Silicon Valley, captivated by its innovative spirit and world-class opportunities. He sought work at one of the premier tech giants. After successfully passing the interviews at Google’s London office, he was offered a position in the United States. He hadn’t actively pursued this path initially, but the recruiter’s suggestion to move to America aligned with his vision of exploring the frontier of technology 🇺🇸.

Securing a spot in the H-1B visa lottery in 2014, Peter bought a one-way ticket and crashed on friends’ floors while settling into his new life 🛏️.

“I knew maybe four people here,” he recalls, “and the change was profound.”

At Google, he joined the Search team, working on a C++ search-serving system involving a million CPUs. "It was crazy," he recalls, as he optimized system performance and balanced quality and cost. Consolidating systems and improving efficiency was essential in the colossal architecture.

Chapter 4: Breaking into the Industry

After gaining significant experience at Google, Peter sought greater autonomy and joined Robinhood in 2017, a promising fintech startup 🚀. He thrived in a culture of collaboration, gaining more ownership in a few months than he'd known before. His most impactful project was in trading infrastructure, responsible for placing orders and handling traffic spikes around the market opening at 6:30 a.m PT 📈📉. The work required Golang and PostgreSQL knowledge.

During his time at Robinhood, he witnessed the company transform from a Series B startup with just 60 people into a publicly traded company with over 4,000 employees 🚀. The remarkable journey from a niche disruptor to a globally recognized financial powerhouse was a pioneering experience that Peter had longed for. In 2021, when Robinhood was a focal point of global news headlines, even Peter’s mother in Slovakia asked if he was all right. "It's not even Robinhood’s product there!" he recalls.

Nevertheless, seeing the company become a world-class pioneer was an experience he felt privileged to live through 😇.

Chapter 5: Balancing Work and Family

As Peter's family grew, he shifted his career focus, favoring projects that offered stability over immediate impact. He found solace in his marriage and two daughters, inspiring a renewed focus on personal and professional balance 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧.

“Having this kind of basis settled was awesome,” he reflects 🏡.

After moving to San Francisco proper 🌁, he left Robinhood to join Parafin, a startup founded by ex-Robinhood colleagues. Here, he worked on business logic for loan servicing and developed email pipelines.

"Getting email right was much harder than expected," he acknowledges 📧,

reflecting on the complexity of human communication. Despite the challenges, he became adept at handling business needs efficiently.

Chapter 6: The AI Revelation 🤖

The launch of GPT models, particularly GPT-4, was a turning point in Peter's journey. Initially skeptical of its impact on software engineering, he was eventually convinced of its capabilities after a personal experiment. Late one evening, he provided the model with context to generate an API endpoint in Scala, and the result was mind-blowing—it was better than his own code, with zero bugs 🤯.

Realizing the potential of AI, Peter embraced the opportunity to learn new things rapidly and leverage these tools to explore ground-up development.

His past apprehensions about front-end coding and deployment vanished, as the AI could help him navigate the intricacies of configuration and integration 🤖.

This newfound confidence reignited his childhood passion for building things.

Chapter 7: Plugin Intelligence and Distribution

After Parafin, Peter just started working on Plugin-Intelligence.com, a data-driven platform analyzing and ranking plugins in various marketplaces 📊, beginning with Google Workspaces. Recognizing a lack of comprehensive market data, he set out to provide actionable insights for private equity firms, developers, and journalists. Although building the technology came naturally to him, Peter understood that distribution was a crucial challenge.

“You can have the best ice cream in the world, but if you're selling it somewhere in the Arctic Circle, it doesn't help humanity much,” he quipped 🍦☃️.

Chapter 8: Reflecting and Moving Forward

Peter realized the importance of market research and distribution after an earlier attempt to launch a voice AI business with his spouse failed due to a lack of focus on customer needs. Now, his approach to Plugin Intelligence is grounded in understanding users and market gap 🤗s. From there he plans to move from one project to the next, each offering him lessons in public engagement, distribution, and continuous improvement.

In this way, Peter has gone from the abstract worlds of mathematics and coding to the practicalities of real-world impact. Now, he focuses on connecting with people, finding joy in both sharing his expertise and learning from others. Ultimately, Peter Csiba's story is one of reconciling the abstract with the tangible, blending a love of technology with a desire to build meaningful human connections 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧.

Discussion on the GPT generated text

Yes, the GPT generation arguably takes out some of the human spirits (and for sure all my grammar mistakes I would make 🙈).
But through this "common language" it expressed the gist of my story in a digestible manner while I feel like it reflects my personality quite well.

Let me know what you think, happy to answer any follow up questions!