Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Meet the Bitnami Team: Beltran Rueda




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.

Beltran is the Engineering Manager for our internal and external Tools team, and works in our Seville office.

A brief bio

I am from a small town near Sevilla, Estepa, which you can see in the picture that includes my dog as well.

I started using computers by accident. When I was 14 I won the football lotto. The money from the lotto wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to buy my first computer. At the time, I was really just going to use the computer for video games. Little did I know this was going to be the start of my career.

I started with Linux when I was in the University. The first program I implemented was in C and I spent days and nights tinkering with it just to make it work properly. I would think about the problems that I needed to solve during the day, and suddenly stop what I was doing just to create a solution. There would even be times that I would stop eating lunch, so I could run to my computer and try out an idea.

Throughout the whole project, I enjoyed working on every aspect of it and I was amazed with all opportunities that coding provided. However, it was really hard to do since I didn’t have Internet when I went back home.

Since I didn’t have Internet all the time, I started learning more about Linux by reading books and running code examples from Linux magazines. One of the first examples was to implement and deploy a Python-based radio server.

Why did you join Bitnami and what excites you about working here?

Daniel Lopez, Bitnami’s founder and CEO, came to my University to talk about Open Source, the Apache Software Foundation and the projects he was working on. I really wanted to work on similar projects, so I took the opportunity to apply for their open position. Since I applied while I was in school, I started working at Bitnami even before finishing my Telecommunication engineering degree.

Bitnami gave me a great opportunity to learn new technologies and to grow professionally. I started simplifying the installation process for some of the first companies in the commercial Open Source ecosystem like MySQL, GroundWork, Zenoss, SugarCRM and more.

After 6 years, I decided to improve my management skills and I started a Master in Business Administration (MBA) in a Spanish Business School. At the same time, Bitnami was starting to grow the company, so I was excited to bring my new skill set to the team by adding more internal structure, teaching new developers and spreading the word about Bitnami at technical conferences.

What are you working on?

I manage the tools team, which focuses on improving our internal tools to ensure that all of our assets are easy to build, tested, and kept up-to-date. They include everything from installers for all operating systems, cloud images for all of our cloud partners, and all of our container/Helm charts. This is quite exciting because of the scale of the tasks (we regularly need to update thousands of apps across all platforms) but also because we get to touch every single technology out there, from system packaging to cloud APIs to Docker. Along with maintaining our internal tools, we also work to continuously simplify the deployment process for each of these target platforms by building out our automation pipeline.

What do you like to do for fun?

I love nature. I usually go to the mountains with my wife, dogs and sometimes with my nephews. I am not a sportsman, but I enjoy hiking or biking. Thanks to the good weather in the south of Spain, I love going out with friends to have some our traditional “tapas” over the weekend.

I usually attend technical meetups in and around Seville, so if you see me in one of them stop by and say hello!

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