Dorin Popovici Retires After 14.5 Years at Calian

After a 14.5-year career at SED/Calian, Dorin Popovici is retiring, effective Dec 31, 2022, as Senior Ground Systems Analyst, Satellite Engineering. Dorin started his career with SED Systems in June 2008 as a Junior Ground Systems Analyst after searching for more variety and for a more challenging position in IT.

Dorin has witnessed the company grow and evolve during his time working at the St. Hubert, Quebec location. “I’ve witnessed many changes throughout the years at the St. Hubert site.” said Dorin. “Some of those changes include constant and fast-paced growth of project and task diversity and complexity, new missions entailing a growing and increasingly challenging role for the Calian St-Hubert team, continuous improvement of the quality and reliability of the services and solutions delivered to customers, along with continuous growth of the team's knowledge and expertise.”

According to Dorin, “participating in new and interesting projects and being in touch with the latest innovative IT solutions and software applications in the world” are what compelled him to continue working with the company all these years.

Dorin has provided value to the team in a variety of areas over the years. “He was interested in the opportunity to work on a variety of different systems in several roles and he was not disappointed.,” says Keith Landry, Lead Ground System Analyst, Satellite Engineering. “He has been a developer, a troubleshooter, and an innovator—and he’s excelled at it all. Dorin has championed our antenna de-conflict system, he’s been our main administrator for Bugzilla (and tricked it out nicely) and he’s mastered the most heinous of beasts—the new Emac and CRTmac, the dreaded two-headed giant of Labview. Dorin is not a person to ever say ‘good enough’ and he will ensure every job is done completely, effectively and efficiently.”

Dorin has also noticed various changes to the industry as a whole during his 14.5-year career with Calian. He has noticed an increase in IT systems' variety and diversity, global growth in online learning, continued expansion of remote work and videoconferences, cybersecurity improvements, turn-key systems capable of immediate implementation with a smoother learning curve, plus virtualization and cloud migration.

Some of Dorin’s proudest work moments include “obtaining the full, necessary expertise and specific knowledge as a GSA team member and satellite operations team member, getting the necessary self-training, and then designing and building key web applications and integrating them to satellite operation, plus developing monitoring and control Labview key applications used on satellite communication chain,” said Dorin.

When asked if it will be difficult for him to retire, Dorin said “Yes. It will be difficult to no longer see my special GSA colleagues and SatOps family. It is also difficult to suddenly let go of projects into which I put my energy, knowledge and passion during so many years, to design, build and keep them in the best possible shape.”

Dorin has been a trusted colleague during his time with the company. “Dorin has served as 24/7 on-call support along with the GSA team, which has gotten more complex and demanding as we have added more and more missions,” said Keith. “Dorin has been instrumental in setting up and maintaining one of the pillars of our operations, the backup system. We use a system called Bacula and it is always a pleasure to hear Dorin say that with his Romanian accent! Dorin is a consummate professional and teammate who is always generous with his time and support for his colleagues. In his retirement, I hope Dorin finds all the time he needs to work in his beautiful garden, listen to the blues and read as much philosophy as he can find.”

Retirement plans for Dorin include “returning to all the projects, plans and dreams that I had put aside after university when I started working,” says Dorin. “This mostly means leaving the technical world and renewing with travelling, gardening and the artistic world. I hope to finally have enough time to satisfy my desire for all possible art-consuming experiences and to explore my art-creating potential. From now, I should be able to turn beauty from a ‘luxury’ back into a necessity.”