Liubov’s parents both work in IT, so from an early age she knew that this was a field she’d be interested in. During her time at school different projects came up and gave her opportunity to explore different areas of IT. At around twelve she took part in a competition at school where a group of students had to build a robot and develop its software. It was a good experience, but didn’t really resonate with Liubov right away.

So she moved her attention to data science. She learned about analysing and modelling data and studied the science of it at university. However, there was another area of developement that had grabbed her attention firmly. Liubov, next to being excited by everything IT, had been drawing from an early age. It’s a passionate hobby, imagining something from a white sheet of paper and bringing it to life.

Seeing her studies were more theoretical than practical, Liubov really wanted to find a job where she could actually create something exciting. Data science meant coding many lines, before a result could be seen. But mobile development gave her the opportunity to write a couple of lines of code and then see an effect. One could see something being created, just like a drawing takes shape with only a few brushes of a pencil. And just like in drawing, from that point on, you are working on something that is alive.

So Liubov taught herself Swift, initially because it seemed wise to learn a language that is really specialized is fast, efficient and gives feedback in real-time. After a while it became apparent though, that Swift’s lack of full cross-platform support might be a problem when wanting to develop mobile apps in the future. In came Flutter.

When asked, what part of her work on “VfL Connect App” is exciting to her she replies: “It’s all exciting! It was my first job, my very first project and we developed this innovative app from scratch.” The team didn’t just code the app from the literal blank page, they also built themselves as a team and its processes at the same time. Working in a small team on a very new idea in a project that has only just started, when you’ve only just learned the coding language, can be daunting. To Liubov it was a welcome challenge. She dove into her tasks, tried to solve them, tried all kinds of solutions, asked her senior colleagues questions and learnt by doing the job.

Liubov has since become an important part in our development team and represents our motto, that we don’t have a product if we don’t have the people behind it. But we end up with an excellent product, because we have excellent people working on it.