Cat Stefanovici

My name is Catalin Stefanovici, most people call me "Cat". I hire and manage teams of software developers. I strive to improve software development life cycles by optimizing both code and workflows.

I am interested in talking about engineering management, database optimizations, and emerging technologies. I am currently very interested in modern PHP8 development and the Laravel and VueJS ecosystems.

I am also the Chief Technology Officer at SportsRecruits, an awesome platform that empowers high school athletes and their families gain exposure to market themselves to college coaches.

I've been writing code since I was a teenager. Whether for making websites, developing tools, multimedia art, or apps, I've always considered software the most amazing tool for creation.

My journey started with surfing the web on dial-up internet in Romania. While HTML was my first (markup) language, VisualBasic was my first introduction to programming.

C++ and PHP followed once I moved to the US and went to college at NYU. College pushed me into digital art and working with sensors and multimedia using Processing and Max/MSP.

Mostly enjoy making things by piecing these things together and leveraging all that they can do

After first focusing solely on front-end development right out of college, I wanted to join a start-up and found Classtivity (now Classpass) just as they (we) were entering TechStars. This experience gave me the insight and desire to pursue building Internet services that enrich people's lives and opened my interest into scaling, performance and infrastructure.

SportsRecruits followed, where I got to build a an entire SaaS platform that helps families and athletes reach their dreams of playing sports in college.

I used my learnings to help build a talented team that is constantly evolving its processes and a code base that our team keeps secure, cutting edge and up to date by using best practices and integrating with modern tools and libraries.