I have to say that I have been fortunate enough for multiple things to align and open the gates at various crossroads of my life. Here are a few of the pivotal points in my career: 

1. Getting a scholarship from SOROS and affiliated organizations to attend Deerfield Academy high school in the US. This experience exposed me to a society where success is solely dependent on you. It served as a jumping board to my education and helped me eventually get accepted at Yale University. 
2. Starting my professional career at Microsoft. Such large tech companies focus on growing junior engineers, enabling them to not only develop their technical skills, but also learn how to operate across teams and organizations effectively.  
3. Joining Snowflake at the right time. Snowflake was on my radar for a number of years. As they started to scale exponentially, I felt that my experience and interests were quite aligned with what they wanted to do, and I wanted to help with this growth, all the while learning on the go.  

I got my first computer as a gift from my aunt in my early teens. That initially got me into video games, followed by discovering the internet. That connected me to other young people who were passionate about computers and technology. I learned programming in BASIC and Pascal, which eventually led to me participating in various local and international programming competition

My father Slobodan was always a role model for me. He taught me how to be happy about the things I have, but never be satisfied. To be hungry and foolish is something I think is very important, and I was inspired to be like this from a speech by Steve Jobs. My father passed away back in 2011, but at every point of success, I look back and thank him.  

I spent most of my youth swimming competitively, and swimming is a sport in which you often compete against yourself. I used to spend up to 5 hours per day working out, swimming between two walls back and forth. Every stroke I took was an opportunity to learn and improve – a chance to do better and be better, and I was racing against myself to improve my best time. This striving later on transferred in my professional life – every chance given, is a chance to improve and achieve more.  There will be mistakes, there will be setbacks, however, as the old quote by Alexander the Great goes – “there is nothing impossible to him who will try” 

Focus on experiences, not skills. Knowing a specific programming language or having a certificate for knowing a particular product will acknowledge you have gained appropriate skills. However, if you are not able to adjust those skills and transfer them to the appropriate situation or need, they are as good as not having them at all. For example, if you become an expert for C#, but your new job requires Java, you will need to start from scratch. On the other hand, doing a deep dive into designing and building distributed systems will help you in any related project, regardless of whether you are using C#, Java, C++, or just pseudo-code on the whiteboard.   

Cloud Computing, ML/AI, Augmented Reality, Cybersecurity, e-Health, FinTech are some of the top technology trends developing in the past decade. Data is in the middle of all of them. They all generate, use, and manipulate data to the point where we are completely drowning in data. If we figure out how to store, transform, and access that data effectively, additional insights will open up inspiring new technological forefronts. Data is the new gold and it will become even more important.