TRR-ODC Defenders day

Each year on 23rd of February all men in post-USSR countrues and from post-USSR countrues celebrating their day, which is historically a day of Defender of the Fatherland.

At this time of day all women trying to prepare something special for her men at home and work.

And our team girls were not an exception :)

At the end of hardworking week we offered a little of relax and good mod by stand-up meal party ...

 and pababammm!! - magician, who made this evening more festive!

 Now some of us also can do a magic :

We congratulate again ALL our men here in Belarus and also share warm greetings with all our defenders in USA, Germany and France!

Winter picture flood from Pavel

Hi guys!

All you know that winter isn't easy time here in Belarus :) Somebody is always ill, and we're complaining on the calls that is is soooo cold :)

And yes, it looks like this in the morning:

Or like this right near the office:

Sometimes it is down to -30 Celsius, and I tell you that's ass freezing cold! And then it gets even worse when it gets warmer(like now, we have something near 0). It feels like crossing the icy lake :)

So you may think is sounds like 'kill me or let me change the country NOW!' but it is not so bad really!

In winter you can dress as a Father Frost, which is a localized version of Santa Claus here:

Or you can play a table tennis indoors and then drink a cocktail with a home made fair trade ice:

Then you can always have a walk in the city, and it looks marvelous in the evening:

Of course you can leave the country and go to even deeper winter, like Alex from Catalog&Search team did with his wife:

But you will return and that's a good time to visit a country side which looks like this:

Or even like this:

Coming back to extreme sports - you can build a snow park with friends:

And then you can visit it back:

And have a ride:

And in the snowboarding, you know, it is all about choosing right colors:

And a healthy life-style  of course:))))

All these is just a small part of what you can actually do in winter and never can do in a forever-summer climate :) So don't be scared guys we are doing quite well here!

We got a SUPERMANager!

Today was a great day for our PM and friend Irina Ivanova, who finally got her Management certificate about successfull completion of Introduction to management programm conducted by EPAM Carrier Development center.
It was a 3 month set of many of interesting trainings, cources and assesments related to different areas of managers work, like :

which at the end will help her to be an effective and wise manager of TRR-ODC team!

We congratulate Irina and wish her new challeges and big opportunities in her carrier!

Congrats to our Q4 2012 top performers!

Our first review at http://hero.epam.com has completed and now we can announce top performers of Q4 2012.

21 of 32 members took part in voting, 44% of stars from the total number of available were awarded to colleagues. It is a good start!

The most initiative member of our team is Nadya Lazuta and this is not a surprise J

Nadya, from all our team we thank you for your proactive position, for “Get Closer” initiative, for initiative & effort spent on improving our processes!

Katya, welcome aboard!

Last week new .NET developer Katsiaryna Shpihel joined our team. She will be working together with Valiantsina mainly on Match&Approve component.

She started to work at EPAM at 2010 and joined Reuters account first. After position termination she participated in several small projects and at the same time was looking for the project where she can apply her analytical skills, grok complex architecture and algorithms. So she joined our project anticipating opportunity to apply her skills.

Who is Katya outside EPAM? She is very active person. She enjoys riding a bike, skating, travelling J