Success Stories: Monica Sarbu

Berlin Buzzwords Success Stories is our brand new blog series where we ask people in the bbuzz network to share their own story.

Part of ensuring a wide range of opinions and ideas can be shared at Berlin Buzzwords is ensuring that people from underrepresented groups within the Berlin Buzzwords community can attend and engage with the discussions. Historically Berlin Buzzwords, like the tech scene at large, has been a pretty white and male dominated space.

One way we want to change this is to highlight some of the voices of people in our network from underrepresented groups. We want to share their stories and learn what drove them in their careers.Today, we hear from Monica Sarbu: Monica is in the Berlin Buzzwords program committee and the founder and CEO of xata.io, providing a serverless database service for Jamstack applications. Furthermore, Monica founded tupu.io, which she tells us more about today. Welcome, Monica!

What shapes us as a person? A cumulation of origin, day to day life events, meeting new cultures, learning from mistakes, raw models, passion, determination.. Life is a series of ups and downs and they all contribute to us being what we are.

In good times, you need to keep your feet on the ground, and in the bad times you need to learn from your mistakes and find a way to move forward. This is not easy. If you are in an argument with a colleague, if you are struggling to get a promotion, if you are struggling to get recognized for your contributions, if you are struggling to balance family with work, it’s important to have someone to reach to so that you don’t feel alone.

For this reason I decided to build tupu.io, a non-profit organization that offers free mentorship for women in tech, People of Color, and LGBTQ+. Because even a small piece of advice or support can push someone over a situation and change their life in the long term.

I have seen many software engineers approaching personal development in a very structured way. They set their goal to become a manager in a few years. When this happens, they actually realize that being a manager is not the next level of software engineering, and in many ways as a manager you are starting over, and your learnings from being a developer don’t really apply as a manager.

As silly as it sounds, my goal was to be happy and work on the things that make me happy. Without even realizing it at the beginning, working on something that I enjoyed and made me happy, motivated me and forced me to always learn new things, new skills, and evolve much faster as an individual in my career.

What about you? Do you want to share your story here too? Feel inspired by the stories you read? Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@berlinbuzzwords.de