When your curiosity fuels both your passion and career

On weekends, Toni is the bassist in a band; during the week, he is a technical lead at Yonder

One man, two passions, endless drive and curiosity. Most people treat their job and their passions as a trade-off. Time spent on one means time is taken from the other. Toni Simu never accepted that equation. He leads technical work at Yonder during the week and plays the bass at events on weekends. If you ask him how these passions became his careers, he won’t talk about discipline or time management. He talks about curiosity and the people who have encouraged him to continuously explore the possibilities.

One drive opens two doors

The instinct to follow up on his curiosities developed early. As a kid, Toni would join his aunt at work after school. There, he would go to the IT office just to ask the manager how the servers worked. Around the same age, a classmate took him to the Children’s Palace to watch piano lessons, and he came home wanting to play an instrument. His parents gave him a toy keyboard play just one note at a time. He taught himself Christmas carols with one finger. That was enough for them to sign him up for piano lessons.

He didn’t see technology and music as separate paths back then. They were two interests worth exploring, and he still sees it that way.

Later, his school orchestra, in which he played piano, needed a bassist, but no one volunteered. Toni picked it up, expecting to be challenged.

“I thought I had no talent for it. I’d never played guitar or anything like that. It seemed hard. But I picked up the bass, and that was it. The bass became my instrument.”

Toni joined a teenage band that played covers wherever they could get on stage. When Toni moved to Cluj-Napoca for university, the music paused. But the curiosity didn’t.

Growing at Yonder by grabbing each opportunity

Toni joined Yonder in the summer of 2014 as an intern, starting on .NET. Partway through a second internship, management offered him a full-time position on a Python project. He took it, even though he didn’t feel ready. The project turned out to be a system for automated surveillance cameras in gas stations. After half a year, he moved to a project building software for nursing homes. He stayed on it for six years, growing through every stage of seniority offered by the work and developing his technical skills.

When he joined the Tech Board, something clicked. He saw colleagues who moved freely between stacks and paradigms, and he wanted that perspective, too. So he went for it: .NET, Android, Ionic, Angular… more Python. Each context made him sharper in all the others.

None of those moves happened in isolation. Each one started with someone offering a chance, and Toni saying yes.

“The main reasons I stayed at Yonder are the people and the opportunities they gave me, also outside the projects. From the support to speak in public to the space to experiment with hardware through Yonder Makers.”

He learned to take feedback as fuel instead of criticism. That’s a skill that carries well from a code review to a rehearsal.

Finding his place in Cluj’s music scene

A colleague introduced him to bands in Cluj who needed a bassist. That became November Black, a rock band that recorded an album. Then came the pandemic, and everything came to a halt.

At a colleague’s wedding, Toni watched a band called Trupa Reea, and he felt something: this is the kind of band I want to play in. Months later, when a sound engineer he knew mentioned Trupa Reea was looking for a bassist, he went to the audition the next day. He knew some of the other bassists trying out were technically stronger.

“I went in, I played, and I told them no matter if they would accept me or not, for me it was a pleasure to play with them, and I enjoyed the experience. That mattered to them more than being the most technically impressive person in the room.”

He got the call. The first year was a grind, with over eighty songs to learn. After one rough rehearsal, he went home and worked through the night. Not to impress anyone, but to understand where he fits.

“There are a lot of instruments on a stage. Your job isn’t to fill every space. It’s to know exactly what your space is, and own it.”

That’s a sentence that could come from a code review, almost word for word.

One professional, two passions that became careers

Today, Toni is a Technical Lead at Yonder. He works across multiple projects, validates technical decisions, and leads proposals for new client engagements. Both of his worlds move fast. Technology ships something new every month, and so does the music scene. Both reward the person who keeps learning. And both run on the same engine: responsibility.

“When you commit to a client, you deliver. When you commit to a performance, you show up. There’s no version of either where you back out because something more convenient came up.”

Toni’s story is worth telling not because he’s an exception at Yonder, but because this is how the place actually works. It is built to let someone be genuinely excellent at their technical work without asking them to shut off the rest of who they are. The curiosity and drive that make him good at framing a client’s problem are the same curiosity that make him a better musician. Yonder doesn’t treat that as a distraction. It treats it as the whole point.

“You’re never going to be ready. The question isn’t whether you’re prepared. It’s what’s the worst thing that can happen if you try? Most of the time, the answer is: not much. And sometimes, trying something you’re not ready for is exactly how you become the person who can do it. That’s when passions become careers.”