Implementing technical expertise for delivering different types of projects is at the core of what software development company Generic Soft has been working on for the past few years.
Founded in 2020, the Bulgaria-based company managed to expand to more than 30 people in less than two years, growing teams in variety of areas, such as Back-end (Java, Spring, Go, Blockchain, Solidity, Cloud), Back-end Python (Django, Flask), ML Python (Numpy, Pandas, TensorFlow, Keras, SciPy), and more.
How did it all begin for Generic Soft? The company’s three founders – Mariyan Iliev, Stefan Vadev and Pavel Paunov – have years of experience in programming, technical leadership, and education.
The young company has been constantly striving to improve and upskill their people, which in turn brings a productive and efficient collaboration with their clients, including cloud software companies, hardware manufacturers, and blockchain companies among others.
“Generic Soft’s leadership team has huge technical expertise and experience in delivering different types of projects, so the project management communicates the potential opportunities with the technical leads. It can quickly make effective decisions about the technologies that need to be used, the developers’ skills required, and the optimal size of the team that has to be built,” the company’s co-founder and CTO Stefan Vadev says.
The best practices in software development
The company’s success can be attributed to a number of factors including their dedication to best practices in software development, their commitment to working closely with clients, and their focus on building strong relationships with employees.
From its beginning, Generic Soft has been strict to implementing its work principles by having customer-driven technologists writing well-designed and efficient object-oriented code.
However, nothing speaks louder than the actual work that the company has done for its clients.
SeCloud is Cloud-based software that gives clients full real-time asset control from a GDPR perspective, and which was looking for a long-term partner who could solve a wide range of complex problems on various platforms.
Their company’s first request was for a special Desktop agent application for Windows, which gathers all the network, hardware, and GPS location information and updates the API on demand.
What Generic Soft did in this case was to help with the delivery of the software part related to building the desktop services for Windows, which manages the required processes on the clients’ machines.
After successfully deploying the Windows version of the agent service on production, Generic Soft managed to deliver the macOS and Linux versions of the service.
Then, SeCloud assigned Generic Soft a very challenging additional functionality, which allows the client to fully delete the hard drive of any machine irreversibly, triggered remotely from the SeCloud API.
In turn, Generic Soft managed to deliver the required features by having an efficient team, built on the expertise the company gathered during the years, together with the practical project management and delivery of the various software components.
Another case that illustrates the company’s versatility is its work with LimeChain, a leading Blockchain and DLT solutions company that specializes in helping enterprises and blockchain startups design, build and scale innovative solutions.
Having to deal with extensive growth and challenging projects, LimeChain was looking for a high-quality vendor of software services, and hired Generic Soft to work on one project. Soon afterwards, LimeChain decided to extend its partnership with Generic Soft to other projects and collaborate on other fronts, making the company one of its key partners.
“They invest a lot to train their colleagues to match their high standards. We always go through interviews when starting new collaborations. We’re working with Generic Soft on multiple projects, where they are incorporated as part of the team. They are mainly focused on web development but also gained knowledge in web3 because of the project’s specifics and the field we are working on,” LimeChain’s Chief of Delivery Velisav Ivanov explains.
In their project for Bianor, an award-winning software development company with more than 20-year experience implementing custom high-tech solutions for leading companies in the technology, media, telecommunications, and defense industries, Generic Soft provided Java developers that joined Bianor’s development team.
The developers helped implement critical features and functionalities of the client’s monitoring tool, such as Video Quality Monitoring, VOD operations, APG monitoring, etc, and actively participated in software development phases, including requirements gathering, architectural architecture preparation, and deployment.
Transferring the knowledge to the teams and helping them grow
The Generic Soft’ leadership team has also guided and taught more than 500 people in the code craft, helping the company establish proven methods for its development and the subsequent development of their teams. At the beginning of 2022, the company also became a part of the Bulgarian Association of Software Companies (BASSCOM).
“Generic Soft’s leaders were technical trainers part-time for multiple years and taught hundreds of people fundamental and advanced programming concepts. Our students were both students without experience in IT learning centers like SoftUni, Pragmatic LLC, Progress, and senior developers in companies like Bosch, United Bulgarian Bank, and Borika AD,” Vadev explains.
For developers themselves, being a part of a company where they can learn, upgrade their knowledge and at same time work on exciting projects is the biggest motivation there is.
“As a developer, for me, it’s very important to work on exciting and challenging projects. Without a challenge, work may become repetitive and boring. In Generic Soft, that’s never the case. My personal motivation for working on demanding projects is the challenge itself – it develops me as a software engineer. It teaches me patience and many other skills and habits, which just cannot happen while working on a tedious project with monotonous tasks,” the senior software engineer Yoan Sredkov points out.
Furthermore, what is also important for Sredkov is the company’s development culture.
“All employees have a personal development plan which aligns with the company’s values – if one wants to be a Go developer, so be it. Our internal community is very strong – there is a constant exchange of help and resources (articles, videos, and other learning materials). We have access to many paid courses – Udemy, Pluralsight, etc. There are also a lot of internal knowledge-sharing sessions, where one or more developers create lectures and present them to the rest of the team. The approach of the technical leadership is very effective – they are always open to research, and new challenges,” Sredkov highlights.
And for the management itself, choosing who to become a part of the company doesn’t always depend on technical skills alone.
“The interview process consists of two phases – social and technical. The technical part is more or less clear – we determine the candidates’ current level of programming and IT-related skills. However, for us, the first part is more important. We tend to look for people like us – driven, result-oriented, eager to learn and improve, and open to career development and technical challenges,” Vadev adds.
Additionally, the expertise that Generic Soft has gathered during the years is helping with its practical project management and delivery of the various software components, and being adaptable allows the company to consistently and successfully manage clients’ changing requirements, he concluded.
