Hi, I’m Gabriel, and I’m probably the kind of person who takes apart things to understand how they work – and then spends way too much time trying to put them back together better than they were before – with spare parts left.
I’m based in Ruse, Bulgaria, where I live with my wife and spend most weekends these days renovating our apartment. Again. For some reason, it always needs something fixed, upgraded, or completely redone, but I actually enjoy the hands-on work.
When I’m not wielding power tools, I’m usually deep in some kind of a tech project. I’m a bit of a hobby DIY builder – the kind who sets up home servers, renovates the bathroom, automates things that probably don’t need automating, and genuinely gets excited about making technology work seamlessly in the background.
My professional journey has been all over the place, but there’s a common thread: I’m ridiculously hands-on and product-oriented about everything I touch. Working as support taught me that feedback is usually gathered all wrong – people don’t understand it, or worse, they think they do but completely miss the point.
I’ll never forget this one hardware company where customers asked for a connector with “more bandwidth.” The product person thought they understood but didn’t want to ask for clarification. So we manufactured 50-100 units with completely wrong connectors. When they arrived and we placed them on the website, customers were absolutely flabbergasted – an expensive lesson in why assumptions kill products.
These days, I’m juggling multiple roles while finishing my PhD research on automatic analysis of user data. As a former founder, I’m proud we sold Bimbala to another team who saw value in our approach to gathering feedback. Not every exit is a unicorn story, but seeing your work live on in someone else’s hands feels pretty good.
What really drives me is getting useful information to people who can’t afford the fancy solutions. Sometimes that’s through products I build, sometimes it’s just sharing what I’ve learned the hard way or by the “books” I’m writing at the moment.
In my spare time, you’ll find me tinkering with cars, exploring topics that probably shouldn’t fascinate me as much as they do, or trying to convince my wife that yes, we really do need another home server. Life’s too short not to be curious about how things work – and how to make them work better.