Ivett Ördög

Phone+49 179 485 8723
Photo of Ivett Ördög

Summary

I help software teams become faster, safer, and more collaborative by making modern software practices tangible and repeatable.

As a technical coach, speaker, and creator of the Lean Developer Experience, I specialize in shortening feedback loops, building habits that help engineers deliver with confidence—even in complex legacy systems.

I've led high-impact projects as an engineering manager, coached dozens of teams through change, and built tools that support better workflows for AI coding agents and human developers alike.

You can also watch my video summary or explore my YouTube channel @NextIncrement, where I share lessons from coaching, leadership, and 35 years of coding.

My Services

Custom Software Development
Consultant & Fullstack Developer

I take on select custom software projects where high quality, rapid delivery, and thoughtful design are critical. I specialize in building modern web applications using Next.js and TypeScript, but I'm equally comfortable working across a wide range of technologies—including Python, PHP, Ruby, and C++.

Whether it's a proof of concept, an internal tool, or a production-grade system, I bring a strong product mindset and engineering rigor to every project. If you’re looking for a partner who can ship fast without cutting corners, let’s talk.

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Founder, Facilitator

Lean Developer Experience helps teams accelerate delivery, improve collaboration, and build lasting habits for high performance. By immersing participants in fast-paced, real-world simulations, the workshop enables engineers to internalize lean practices and continuous feedback—driving measurable improvements long after the event.

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Coach

Tech Talks Lab empowers engineers to communicate their ideas with confidence, increasing visibility and accelerating career growth. Through live practice sessions, peer feedback, and a supportive community, members develop public speaking skills essential for leadership, recognition, and long-term success in tech.

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Samman Technical Coaching
Technical Coach

Samman Technical Coaching helps teams rapidly develop their collective technical skills through hands-on learning. Over a 12-session block, I work side-by-side with your team in 3-hour sessions, tackling real challenges in legacy code and large distributed systems. Teams gain practical strategies for improving code quality, navigating complexity, and driving sustainable technical excellence—together.

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Projects

Creator

Technologies: TypeScript

RefakTS is a command-line tool that helps AI coding agents work more effectively with TypeScript projects. Maintainable code improves agent performance—so RefakTS automates the detection and fixing of code quality issues through provably correct, AST-based refactorings.

The project is in a proof-of-concept stage but is already proving useful in bootstrapping its own development.

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Creator

Technologies: C#, Java

What if putting a legacy codebase under test was easy—maybe even just a click of a button?

SpecRec captures real-world class interactions in legacy systems and turns them into fast, isolated unit tests with minimal developer effort. It’s designed to bypass the usual hurdles of dependency injection and test setup, making it dramatically easier to get legacy systems under test.

Available in C# and Java.

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Employment history

Contentful
Engineering Manager
September 2020 - December 2023

Projects:

  • Content level permissions
  • Environment governance
  • SDK maintenance
  • Diff and merge tools for contentful environments

My primary role at Contentful is managing a team that was originally focusing on the developer persona, but later on has shifted towards enabling collaboration between different roles by developing tools. Our early projects included content level permissions via a tag-based permission system, and environment governance. After that we started working on CI/CD tooling which grew into what is now known as the merge app. It essentially allows developers to make and test content model changes in a sandbox environment, and then merge those changes back into the main line, like one would merge changes across git branches. As the feature was rolled out it became clear that there is interest for also content getting merged in the same fashion, so that editors and content creators have access to the same git-like workflows as developers.

I was also managing a group of external contractors who are tasked with keeping our SDKs up to date. After joining Contentful a couple of management issues surfaced which prompted me to redesign the process of how we interact with our contractors.

Other cross-company projects I've been working on are the reboot of our Hackdays after the pandemic, building a guest sprint system, that allows our developers to spend a sprint in another team to facilitate inter-team relationships, and knowledge sharing.

I've also been leading the inclusion and diversity working group at Contentful. It is an employee-organized initiative that tries to bring awareness to diversity topics.

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Prezi
Senior Software Engineer
April 2020 - July 2020

Technologies: Scala

Projects:

  • Asset management backend
Instructure
Senior Software Engineer
March 2019 - January 2020

Technologies: Ruby, Kotlin, Spring, TypeScript, ReactJS

Projects:

  • Training program for new hires: Extreme Programming practices, technologies used
  • Organized sponsor booth and activities for Kotliners Conference
  • Part of the team extracting message sending into a single service from multiple services (Developer and technical lead)

Although I was hired as a software engineer at Instructure, I spent the first few months of my tenure with other activities I volunteered for. Since the Budapest office was brand new and had no existing engineering culture, I set up a training program that introduced our engineers to Agile practices (Mainly Extreme Programming), DevOps and the tools we were about to use: Kotlin with Spring, Ruby on Rails, and ReactJS.

As a software engineer I worked on a back-end service that rendered, bundled, and delivered email notifications informing the user about events that happened within their Bridge account. I was first involved as a developer and later as the technical lead responsible for breaking down the epics into stories, and steering the team in the right direction.

To recruit more engineers Instructure, Budapest sponsored Kotliners conference. I took responsibility for organizing our presence. Setting up the booth, getting designs for swag, having them manufactured, and made sure we had exciting activities for participants that motivated them to visit our booth.

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Emarsys
Team lead, Software engineer, Product owner
April 2012 - March 2019

Technologies: PHP, MySQL, Ruby

Projects:

  • Stabilization of a workflow engine as team lead
  • Scaling up of data import feature as team lead
  • Lead of the Bootcamp team, responsible for onboarding of new hires
  • Founder and part of CraftLab coaching team, organized meetups and trainings

I spent most of my time at Emarsys as a Team Lead responsible for the development of the product Automation Center. It is essentially a workflow engine that lets users create a flow chart of marketing events and then executes it. During execution, it called several other services in succession. As the load increased on the back-end, strange bugs started to appear. After investigating the issues, we found two causes behind it: at several points in the code the operation's success wasn't being checked and even when failure was detected retrying the operation meant that certain steps were repeated. To solve this issue, we introduced idempotency into our downstream services and added the missing checks. My talk Learning to fall is a detailed description of this project.

My team was also tasked with speeding up the CSV import processes that was used to keep the customers' contact database in sync with our database. For some customers this daily process took more than 24 hours. Since fixing the performance became an urgent issue, my team had to pioneer Continuous Deployment at Emarsys, which was later rolled out across the entire company.

Another important period during my tenure at Emarsys was when I led the Bootcamp team that introduced our new hires to the company's engineering culture. Since our practices differed from those most companies adhere to, this was an important step in stopping the erosion of our engineering culture. The talk Bootcamp: Protecting the Engineering Culture During Hyper Growth gives a detailed overview of how our bootcamp worked.

I was also one of the people advocating for changing our hiring process which led to the changes described in the talk Your hiring process is broken, and here is how you fix it.

I'm a strong advocate for sharing information with others, so I also became a founding member of Emarsys CraftLab, the dedicated coaching team. We organized meetups, most notably the very successful Craft Meetup series, internal trainings, and workshops like Coderetreats and Lean Poker events. We coached our employees before they gave talks at other conferences, and taught university courses on topics like Agile, Extreme Programming, DevOps, and Test Driven Development.

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Tata Consultancy Services
Software Engineer
September 2011 - April 2012

Technologies: C++, MSSQL

Projects:

  • Worked on an ETL system of a market research application
Eötvös Lóránd University
Researcher, Lead Developer
March 2011 - August 2011

Technologies: C++, Python, MySql

Projects:

  • Led the team tasked with designing and implementing a high-performance web crawler
  • Graph algorithms, Clustering, Spatial data sets, Bio-informatics related online services
Uratim
Software Engineer
September 2005 - August 2011

Technologies: C++, Python

Projects:

  • Implementation and running time analysis of 10 different algorithms for the same global optimization problem

Community involvement

Coderetreat Budapest Meetup Group
Event organizer, facilitator
April 2012 - November 2019

Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, created by Corey Haines, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design, away from the pressures of 'getting things done'.

In 2011, I participated at the first Coderetreat event in Budapest. During the next 7 years, I grew the meetup group into one with over 1,000 members, organized and facilitated over 40 events, making my name synonymous with Coderetreats in Budapest.

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Mensa HungarIQa
Facebook group moderator
October 2017 - January 2019

I joined Mensa - a society for people with IQ in the upper 2 percentile - in 2015 and quickly became active in discussing controversial topics in a respectful way and regularly arguing on both sides of the debate, stepping in the shoes of people I didn't necessarily agree with. Just two years after joining, I was asked by the chair if I would be open to moderating the Facebook group which I accepted. During this time I advocated for making sure that freedom of speech was guaranteed while we also avoided creating a toxic environment for minorities.

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Publications and social media presence

Talks and blogs

I implemented Game of Life 100+ times! This is what I learned
Heapcon Belgrade
2023

Explore a mind-bending feature of functional programming, how you can easily get started with GPU programming, and learn about underappreciated SQL features that you didn't know you need.

Abstract- Video

How to sell a big refactor or rewrite to the business?
Craft Conference, Budapest
2022

Code quality should be improved incrementally, or at least that is what most agile practitioners seem to preach. Yet from time to time teams will argue that it is necessary to do some sort of makeover, that the code is too convoluted to be incrementally fixed. So is there a situation where that actually makes sense? Is this dogma that we have been following without examining nuance, or should we really never ever venture into such projects?

Video

Lean Poker: Learn how to deliver value early and often in practice
Agilia Conference, Budapest
2018

To help developers and product people adopt better workflows for delivering, we created a workshop where teams can compete against each other and learn things in practice along the way. The talk introduces the most frequent learning points.

Bootcamp: Protecting the Engineering Culture During Hyper Growth
INAT Summit, Belgrade
2018

The engineering culture of a company might be a key to its success, yet as hypergrowth kicks in, it becomes hard to keep it while doubling the number of engineers every year. So the question becomes: Is there a way to protect the culture, and if so, how?

Video- Blog

The scientific method and its applications in software development
DevOps Meetup, Budapest
2017

Uncertainty is at the very heart of innovation. In the talk I define an abstract method and I show examples of how it appears in different disciplines within the tech industry. I challenge you to derive new methods that can help you deal with uncertainty at your own company.

Video- Blog

An introduction to Deep Learning
DevConf, Krakow
2017

Deep learning has been in the news a lot lately, but in most cases the articles are hyperbolic and don't represent the technology well. This introduction gives you a better understanding of what deep learning can and cannot do for you; we even build a simple network using Keras.

Video- Blog

Learning to fall
Voxxed Days, Belgrade
2018

A story of how we learned to build resilient microservices even if they depend on other microservices with a weaker SLA. First I talk about the bad practices to set the stage for the motivation behind the good practices, and then, I introduce a number of useful patterns.

Video

Your hiring process is broken, and here is how you fix it
Change Con, Zagreb
2017

One of the secrets to a successful company is getting the right people on the bus. Yet most companies make the same mistakes when hiring developers. I take you on a journey from an ineffective hiring process to one that makes sure you never regret any of your hiring decisions.

Video

How I learned to love legacy code, and why you should too
DevFest, Vienna
2015

I used to complain about legacy code, but I was wrong. Not because if something generates revenue, then it should be loved! No… that's not an excuse for bad code. There's a more disturbing truth about legacy code, and we need to face it. It's time to learn to love your legacy.

Video

YouTube

Creator
September 2017 - Present

Insights about software engineering, management and iterative development practices in general.

Scientific publications

Education

Eötvös Lóránd University
PhD. School of Informatics, Bioinformatics
2005 - 2010

Thesis: Data Mining and Data Handling in the Field of Bioinformatics

Eötvös Lóránd University
Mathematics Researcher MSc.
2001 - 2005