Managing and Developing a Technology Team

I hired Dali into Farmville during a time when the studio was experiencing rapid growth but was also transitioning from an unstructured, wild-west development mindset chock full of horrible practices. Dali came in and with great gusto set to the task of helping me realize order from chaos such that the department could finally execute its roadmap with certainty. To do this he had to jump headfirst not only into people management and scheduling but also to code and operations. He did an outstanding job and I could not of done mine without him. Later, he helped me form the COBRA group at Zynga, and Dali architected the first rapid development framework for internal and external developers. The work of COBRA was lauded by both centralized teams and studios for its attention to detail ease of use.

Dali is a very bright engineer and engineering director. He delivered within a very short period of time with a small team a product targeted to web and mobile, with a complex server architecture. He is very well versed on technology and technology trends and can distill a very hard engineering problem into an elegant architecture and simple solution.

Dali managed the team very well and was able to get a world-class output, all this why managing partners across different geographies (Frankfurt, San Francisco and McKinney). He works cross-culturally very effectively, both from a person perspective, but also by understanding the culture of the office, the team, etc. Dali brings unprecedented enthusiasm to the team and has the leadership skills that enable him to bring about success when building any product.

Dali held a diverse set of roles on FarmVille, working as an individual engineer, systems lead, and engineering manager, each requiring very different skills and expertise. Dali excelled at every one of them. His work ethic and passion for his work is what distinguishes Dali from his peers and I would absolutely work with Dali again if given the chance.

Dali is a quick and comprehensive thinker, with the mix of strategic judgement and energy level required to follow through to successful implementation. I highly recommend Dali, especially in situations where high ambiguity needs to be distilled to an executable architecture.

Dali is an exceptional hardware systems architect with great depth and breadth of skill. He sees the big picture of how the hardware systems he designs will be used, never looses sight of the business purpose for a system and is comfortable making the kind of trade-off decisions that arise when building commercial systems. In addition to his hardware/systems knowledge Dali also brings a considerable amount of software design and implementation skill to a team. Dali is well suited to a leadership role on any hardware/software development team. It was truely a pleasure to work with him.

Dali is a leader and an architect in the truest sense. He understands complex relationships in systems well beyond his areas of expertise making his contributions valuable in not just a technical sense, but in a business sense. He is always trying to understand the larger market forces at play and optimize designs to bring value to market. His communication style and good nature make him a pleasure to work with and inspires collaboration and communication across functions.

Dali is a top performer with super hands-on skills in SoC architecture and solid leadership skills in training and manging design groups. He exhibits an uncommon blend of technical expertise and business administration.

I work with Dali at NVIDIA and could not but be impressed by the quality of his work. He combines deep technical knowledge with a vibrant energy.
In short, Dali is one of these key persons that makes things happen and provides an example for other people.

I worked with Dali on the same project. It was fun working with Dali. He always had creative ideas on how to solve complicated problems. I think working with Dali made it an interesting project to work on. I would love to work with him again.

Dali is an smart guy with an excellent attitude. Based on our experience together at Ciena, he has very good HW and FPGA background along with a demonstrated strength in HW system architecture. I recommend Dali highly.