Daniel Agafonov

I had the opportunity to work with Daniel Agafonov during his internship at Synergex, where I serve as an Associate Software Development Manager. Daniel picked things up quickly, handled new challenges well, and consistently added value to the projects he worked on.

He contributed to our Visual Studio integration and later joined the effort to design a modern replacement for the SQL Connection product. This was a complex area to step into, but Daniel learned the system fast, helped set up development and test environments, and participated in writing documentation that was useful to the team. He also took part in the high-level design work and helped build an early Rust prototype that our runtime used to connect to SQL Server.

Daniel approached unfamiliar systems with curiosity and persistence, and he adjusted well to the expectations of a professional engineering team. He also took initiative outside of coding. He co-created the DBL Talks podcast to support new engineers and helped with recording and editing work for our annual conference.

From what I’ve seen, Daniel has strong potential as an engineer. He learns quickly, contributes steadily, and works well with others. I believe he’ll be a solid addition to any engineering team.

I’m pleased to recommend Daniel, who interned with us at Synergex, where I serve as CTO. From the outset, he stood out as incredibly self-motivated and eager to take on real engineering work. He began in our SDI codebase, refactoring and fixing issues identified by static analysis, and quickly showed he could jump into complex systems and tackle work items.

Midway through the internship, Daniel joined a small team working on a modern replacement for our SQL Connection product, migrating from a legacy C library to a new Rust implementation. Under the guidance of a senior engineer, the interns were expected to practice good design and robust engineering practices, not just “get it working.” Daniel ramped up quickly, contributed to the high-level system design, and helped build an initial Rust prototype. A key milestone was updating our runtime to use the new Rust code path, successfully communicating with SQL Server and returning data to the client. He made strong progress on several of the runtime functions used to interact with databases and consistently approached problems with curiosity and ownership.

Beyond his project work, Daniel had an outsized impact on our educational efforts. He was instrumental in creating the DBL Talks podcast, turning internal documentation and course material into three episodes of multimodal educational content for our programming language. That project simply would not have been possible without him. We also thank him for his work on this year’s conference, including setup, recording, and editing.

Daniel combines solid technical skills with initiative, collaboration, and a genuine desire to learn and teach others. I’m grateful for his contributions at Synergex and recommend him without hesitation.