Valentina Cupać

Help your teams deliver quality software faster

I help Tech Founders, CTOs and Engineering Leaders to building a culture of technical excellence. I provide consulting and coaching to help you accelerate product delivery, improve software quality and reduce maintenance costs. I can help you solve the following challenges:

• Accelerating product delivery reliability by reducing release cycles, enabling higher responsiveness to changes in business needs and reducing time-to-market
• Improving software quality, reducing defect rates and reducing time spent on bug fixes, so that your customers can trust your product and good brand reputation
• Scaling teams effectively, reducing reliance on superhero developers but instead building strong teams and avoid bottlenecks, so that you can recruit easier and with juniors

Gain deeper insights into TDD & Clean Architecture

I help Technical Leaders and Senior Software Developers to practice TDD & Clean Architecture in a more effective way. Perhaps you’ve had bad experiences with TDD & Clean Architecture in the past, your team tried it but it didn’t work out. I want to provide you with a synthesized perspective, based on challenges I encountered:

• How can we practice TDD more effectively? What are the biggest pitfalls regarding Unit Testing & TDD? How do we overcome those problems?
• What are the different approaches in applying Clean Architecture? What are the challenges in adopting Clean Architecture and how do we overcome them?
• How we do applying TDD and Clean Architecture with Microservices? How do we solve problems as we shift from Monolithic to Microservice Architecture?

Get answers to your technical questions

Due to the high volume of questions I’ve been receiving from developers on LinkedIn, I’m no longer able to provide technical answers via LinkedIn messaging. Instead, I’ve set up the following channels where you can ask me technical questions or technical advice.

• If you’re looking for premium advice, then you can become a premium subscriber on the Optivem Journal, where you can ask technical questions by posting comments on my articles. Ask me anything, it can be about the articles or anything else, e.g. feel free to ask for advice related to challenges you face in your projects. I generally aim to provide responses on the same day or next day.
• If you’re looking for free advice, you can ask a question via the Tech Excellence GitHub discussions. The purpose of the GitHub community is to enable people to have access to free knowledge sharing. Depending on my free time, I may periodically answer some questions, but these responses are generally delayed.

Become part of the Tech Excellence Community

You’re someone who wants to join of a community of Engineering Leaders, Tech Leads and Software Developers who care about software quality. Technical Excellence is the foundation of sustainable software engineering. Without technical excellence, there’s no quality; the development is slow and cannot be sustainable. Without technical excellence, there’s no agility.

If you want access to knowledge sharing from experts, you’re welcome to join our community. You can visit techexcellence.io to view our full calendar; register on Meetup, subscribe to our YouTube channel; join our GitHub discussions. You can follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Become a Tech Excellence speaker

We’re already full for 2022 (see techexcellence.io) but I am interested in meeting with new potential speakers for 2023. Your personal brand has to be heavily associated with technical excellence, software quality, software craftsmanship. You might be a technical coach, technical trainer, technical leader or software developer. You already have speaking experience – you’ve spoken at meetups, or you’ve spoken at internal company events or you already have organized trainings. You like reading books, you enjoy sharing your knowledge.

During 2022 we had several meetups targeting themes such as TDD. For 2023, I’m looking to expand into themes such as Microservices, Distributed Systems, DDD, CQRS, Lean. Any topics are welcome – as long as helps achieve technical excellence. Also, most of our meetups are technical, for an advanced audience, no marketing/sales pitches.

Start learning TDD & Clean Architecture

The following are some foundational level YouTube videos based on meetups I had done:

• TDD and Clean Architecture – Driven by Behaviour (Valentina Cupać, Java User Group Switzerland)
• TDD and Clean Architecture – Use Case Driven Development (Valentina Cupać, Software Craftsmanship Luxembourg)
• TDD and Clean Architecture – Use Case Driven and Domain Driven Design (Valentina Cupać, Ticino Software Craft)
• TDD in Hexagonal Architecture and Clean Architecture (Valentina Cupać, Tech Excellence)

The code samples which were shown during the meetups are for demo-purposes only, they are available on GitHub, see Banking Kata (Java) and Banking Kata (.NET) but feel free to use it for learning regardless of your current backend tech stack.

After you watch the videos, what’s next? You can get deeper insights by subscribing to the Optivem Journal and you can join the Tech Excellence community. You can also ask me technical questions. Or you can engage me as a technical coach to help your team adopt TDD & Clean Architecture.

Read recommended books

This is a really common question I’ve received. Here’s my shortlist of recommended books (I might further update this list in the future):

• Extreme Programming Explained (Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres)
• Test Driven Development: By Example (Kent Beck)
• Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns (Vladimir Khorikov)
• Continuous Delivery (Jez Humble, Dave Farley)
• Software Engineering at Google (Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum K. Wright)
• Clean Architecture (Robert C. Martin)
• Domain Driven Design (Eric Evans)
• Implementing Domain-Driven Design (Vaughn Vernon)
• Microservices Patterns (Chris Richardson)
• Hexagonal Me (Juan Manuel Garrido de Paz)

If you have any questions regarding these books, or you want to ask about books related to other themes, then you can ask a question.

Recruit excellent developers

You’re a Tech Founder or Engineering leader who is building a culture of technical excellence. You are looking for employees who would fit within that culture. Currently, I do not provide any recruitment services, but I might consider setting up some solution to this problem in the future – some job portal or network perhaps. You can express interest below, so that you can provide more info about what you’re looking for. (I may reach out to you in the future via your email).

Find a company that values technical excellence

You’re a developer who is not satisfied in your current company or in previous companies because they did not have a culture of technical excellence. You are stressed out and burnt out, you feel under-appreciated. You’re looking for a company where you can develop quality software. (I may reach out to you in the future via your email).

Do you want me to promote your books and articles?

I get asked questions from readers who are authors of books or who are writing LinkedIn content, asking me to promote their books, websites, companies, posts; to like, share and comment on their content. Sorry, but I currently do not provide promotional or advertising services.

Something else?

If there’s something else you’d want to contact me about, you can send a message on LinkedIn. Or if you’d like to provide me with feedback about this page, or if there are some additional questions that exist, then feel free to reach out.

Looking forward to hearing from you!