Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Meet the Bitnami Team: Jose Vazquez

The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts.

Jose Vazquez is Senior Backend Developer on Bitnami’s WebDev team, and works remotely from Madrid.

A brief bio

Technology is my passion, specially software, systems and all things digital. I started with C, but then I got into that “new shiny thing” (back then) called Java. I got my degree as a research student at HP Labs Bristol, working on Java distributed systems ideas that later became the “cloud”. Back in Spain I did quite some J2EE-style projects for various companies, some C/C++ and acquired experience with Linux, SQL & Relational Databases, Source Control systems, Javascript and yep, that was the time of all-things XML!

Jose enjoying a bike ride with his son
I've been following Go since its early days, I even made a contribution to the http package, early on. What can I say, I do prefer strongly typed languages generating static compiled binaries after all... Better get annoyed by the compiler at office hours than by page from a production system at 3AM!

In 2013 I moved to Dublin, to work for AWS DynamoDB, maybe the world's biggest NOSQL DB deployment? Keeping the service up & running, we enhanced service internals (Java), and the automation around it (Python & Java). There I made the switch to git, unit testing & code reviews and never looked back! After AWS, I worked for Canonical, delivering the Ubuntu images for “the big 3” and most other clouds. The team was distributed across countries and time zones! Work was mainly in Python & Jenkins.


Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here?

Distributed Systems, cloud and lately containers define my favourite domains of the technology to work within and contribute to.

Bitnami’s focus on keeping hundreds of applications up to date for all consumer channels, especially the cloud and containers, will expose us to interesting problems to which we’ll have to provide state of the art solutions for. We are the first ones doing this, the leaders, at least at the scale Bitnami does it.

On the personal side, apart from the technologies, I was looking for a remote job, preferably more EU than US-centric. Bitnami provided just that, and also the opportunity for me to work with a highly professional and technological skilled group of people all over the world, from home. What else can you ask for?

What are you working on?

I work with the webdev team. Our focus within Bitnami is to deliver awesome applications prepared by the assets team to our cloud partners. Since I just recently started, I am personally focusing more on the backend of things, including amongst others, the on-boarding of new Cloud Service Providers: building and publishing cloud-images/multi-tier solutions to Marketplaces.

The goal of my team is to reach to all clouds and deliver our apps everywhere as flawlessly as possible, aiming for the greatest level of automation.

What do you like to do for fun?

I used to play basketball quite a lot, and ride bikes (a bit less often, I have to admit). Cinema (as an spectator ;-) has always been one of my passions. However, with family duties lately I consider myself lucky if the kids will go to sleep early enough, to let us watch a nice movie, from time to time.

But hey, I do also enjoy having the whole family going out, and maybe shortly watch movies, and even do some bike & basketball again with the kids!

Interested in working with Bitnami and Jose? Apply for one of our open positions!