A couple of months ago I left Viaboxx, more than five years after I started there.
It was a great ride. It combined the excitement and intensity of working at a startup, with the safety of working with a profitable, self-organizing company of experienced full stack developers.
During the time there I worked with everything from Raspberry Pis to huge parcel stations, from single-page-webapp AngularJS applications and Node, to state-of-the-art modern Java-cloud applications. I learned how to do infrastructure-as-code with Puppet, and immutable infrastructure with Docker. We developed our own products, did research projects and provided consulting for big enterprises - always learning, always trying out new things. Being small allowed us to optimize for learning while having an awesome culture where colleagues felt like family or great friends.
Still, a part of me missed some of the challenges I worked more with when I was consulting, or working for larger companies. Helping people to work better. Working better together. All this thinking from my agile days went a little dormant while I was at Viaboxx because there we always did things right, methodology-wise. Most of the oncoming DevOps hype seemed unnecessary, because we were already optimizing for lead-time and were pretty streamlined.
So, around last summer I decided to try something new. I've now finally joined a large but still growing company in Cologne called Eyeo, although you may know them better as the creators of Adblock Plus and the concept of Acceptable Ads. I'll be focusing more in on the infrastructure/operational side of things, at the same time I'm taking on a more managerial position - which could mean pretty much anything, but some organizational coaching is included. Perhaps I'll get back to blogging more actively about the things I'm up to. No promises though.
It was a great ride. It combined the excitement and intensity of working at a startup, with the safety of working with a profitable, self-organizing company of experienced full stack developers.
During the time there I worked with everything from Raspberry Pis to huge parcel stations, from single-page-webapp AngularJS applications and Node, to state-of-the-art modern Java-cloud applications. I learned how to do infrastructure-as-code with Puppet, and immutable infrastructure with Docker. We developed our own products, did research projects and provided consulting for big enterprises - always learning, always trying out new things. Being small allowed us to optimize for learning while having an awesome culture where colleagues felt like family or great friends.
Still, a part of me missed some of the challenges I worked more with when I was consulting, or working for larger companies. Helping people to work better. Working better together. All this thinking from my agile days went a little dormant while I was at Viaboxx because there we always did things right, methodology-wise. Most of the oncoming DevOps hype seemed unnecessary, because we were already optimizing for lead-time and were pretty streamlined.
So, around last summer I decided to try something new. I've now finally joined a large but still growing company in Cologne called Eyeo, although you may know them better as the creators of Adblock Plus and the concept of Acceptable Ads. I'll be focusing more in on the infrastructure/operational side of things, at the same time I'm taking on a more managerial position - which could mean pretty much anything, but some organizational coaching is included. Perhaps I'll get back to blogging more actively about the things I'm up to. No promises though.
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