bio:
I was born and raised in Saint Petersburg, Russia. My first program was written in Algol 60 in high school. My major at the university was applied ... Read More
I was born and raised in Saint Petersburg, Russia. My first program was written in Algol 60 in high school. My major at the university was applied mechanics and my first job back to Russia was in that area. In 1990 we presented our 3D graphics package at the Comtec exhibition in Moscow. That time Autodesk was looking for the young talents; that’s how I was invited to start working for Autodesk in Russia. I was doing well and by 1998 became a key contributor at Autodesk MAP, the second large Autodesk product. When Autodesk closed the Russian office in 1998 I was among 3 guys who were selected from the 43 people SWD team and invited to relocate to San Rafael, CA. I was very lucky to become a part of Autodesk “dream team” and work with the company best developers. Soon I became a team lead and architect. I was leading multiple teams and architecting multiple projects. In 2007 I was happily employed at Autodesk when Gary Wayne, my future boss at SunPower approached me. It turned out his buddies at Autodesk, including Carl Bas, the company CEO, recommended me. I left Autodesk to be among the pioneers of alternative energy. When I joined SunPower, I had an idea how software can streamline design and sales process at SunPower. 7 month later my team was able to ship the first version of the design tool that allowed decreasing a project design time from 3 weeks to 2 days. Moreover, using this tool a designer was able to generate multiple versions of a design and choose the optimal design. A year and a half later my department had 4 successful products that helped SunPower saving millions of dollars (see achievements). We had a geographically distributed team of 20+ people, mostly young talents. I was able to establish best of bread software development processes. We used waterfall for our first project and found it challenging to follow ever changing user requirements. That’s why I introduced Agile Scrum to the team, brought on-site coach and set up 3-day training for the team.
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Alexander Frumkin is now connected to Brian Dempsey.
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