Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Meet the Team: Mose

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.

Based in Taipei, Taiwan, Mose works remotely for the Webdev team.

A Brief Bio

When Internet came to France around 1994, I was a working in advertising as a creative director, but my passion was around automating things. So, I had to learn programming to automate my first websites, first statically and later dynamically with php in 98. Then, I became a developer, learning all I could from practice (thanks to the internet bubble of the 2000’s), and by participating in various open source projects, a real fertile ground for self-learning. Since then, I made my way into programming and system administration while engaging in some activism around Open Source, collective intelligence, environments, and various other things. I always have used Linux, preferably Debian flavored.

In 2008, I decided to learn a new language that was not for programming.. I chose Chinese. I moved to Taiwan and spent one year at a university learning Chinese there. And I never left. Taiwan is a really great country to live in, as a foreigner.

I consider myself a life-long geek with a weird mixed background. More details on http://mose.com

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

What excited me about Bitnami was the type of products that we deliver. Packaging Open Source applications for various platforms and environments is like a public service for the internet. We are at the age where more and more SaaS platforms offer services that transform the internet user in a mere consumer with no control over their data, so Open Source software lost a bit of its power to liberate people. With Bitnami, people can easily deploy Open Source applications in various places, which empowers them to take back control of the internet....and this is a big deal for me.

But there were also many other factors that attracted me to Bitnami like the flexibility to work remotely, and the deliberate intention to make remote work possible and efficient. Since I’m in Asia, I had multiple options to work remotely for other companies, but without a real concern about remote workers in a company, it can be tricky. I was confident that Bitnami would provide a better experience than I had in the past since the overall culture and values are a big part of the company. And the values really have weight internally, it’s not just some paint for external eyes. I like it.

Also, the fact that Bitnami remains on the edge of what’s new and fresh in term of technologies gave me the guarantee that it would be a good environment for potential exploration and discoveries.

What are you working on?

I am on the Webdev team, which is in charge of automating delivery of our packages and images to cloud vendors, and also maintaining various websites and tools available at Bitnami, either publicly or internally.

I just began one month ago, but I can predict that I won’t ever be bored with the work I am doing. There is a lot of different processes to manage and automate. Each cloud vendor, platform or format brings new challenges since there is no real standard in this industry. This is certainly why Bitnami is so valuable because it handle such diverse software and solutions.

The work within my team is mostly focused on writing code to facilitate the pipeline of delivery and the management of workflows, so that the software can reach it's destination in a usable shape and multiple flavors. It’s a lot of invisible work, deep down in the machine, but it’s very pleasant because it’s not simple and it requires a good amount of creative thinking.

What do you like to do for fun?

Mose enjoying a walk around Hong Kong

I’m a very boring person, because for fun, I do some more coding, or sysadmin stuff. I participate in various local and international communities, but it’s usually (not exclusively though) with other geeks. I’m not anti-social at all, it’s just that I’m comfortable with my peers and I like keeping my head inside the game.

Sometimes I do some biking, but I don’t like working out, it is just a logical transportation device for me. Sometimes I cook, but well, that doesn’t count, I’m french after all.

I prefer to have no stress in my daily life. I favor working on things I consider are fun, interesting and make sense, so I don’t feel the need to escape or decompress. I guess that’s the benefit of being older, I play for the long run.

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