tfnico's blog

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...

This is what it looks like when I want to have a look through the logfile, to see what a user did on one of our machines one day: Read the whole story about how it works on the Viaboxx Systems blog (and upvote on DZone !).

A bit over a year ago, me and my colleague Felix started working on a little experimental project during our 20% time. As far as I can remember, we wanted to do some Clojure, and we wanted to make something that looked like a company-internal Twitter. We called it Flurfunk , which is the German word for "office talk" or something along those lines. After a few days of development, we set it up on an internal server, and it was already quite useful, as it was a nice way to group-chat with the whole team. We are co-located, so we don't really IM so much, but it's still nice for pasting URLs and unix one-liners, etc. We then proceeded to integrate it with our Jenkins build notification mails, and commit mails, so there's a nice timeline of what's going on. A bit like our team's heartbeat . A nice bonus is that if either of us are doing home-office, it's a nice way to interact with what the rest of the team is doing. We actually open-sourced...

In the end of June, I left IP Labs to work as a developer at Viaboxx Systems . I had a great time at IP Labs, and learned a lot there, but it was time to try something different. Viaboxx is a small company, much like a startup (although a bit more established). It's a small team of excellent professionals, and they are agile to the very core, much to my liking. I'm learning a lot: Groovy, Grails, with options of doing JavaScript and even some native platform dev in the future. But my favorite part is that I get to work on a whole product. From the user experience in the front-end, through software to the hardware components, the whole team is responsible for making it as good as can be. And just to mention a couple of perks: Waiting for me on my first day was a brand new top-o-the-line 27" iMac. We've got 20% innovation time (FedEx days). We work in a villa. We cook and eat together every day. And the company is sending me up to Oslo for the JavaZone X conferenc...