Meet the Team: Zach Vidibor

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.

Zach is the Head of Enterprise Sales and is part of our remote team based in London, UK.

A Brief Bio

Although I was born and raised in Silicon Valley (Mountain View to be exact), my journey into technology was never one I planned. In my younger years I thought I would either be a professional mountain climber, a Navy SEAL, or a mechanical engineer...but somehow by the time I got to college I ended up studying political science and working at a radio station. And, not surprisingly, by the time I was finishing college, all I knew was I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. I ended up getting a sales job for a company called Ricoh, selling printers and copiers. Anyone who’s had a job like this before will know, it’s a very difficult ‘first sales job’ to have, and didn’t leave me thinking this was my future either. But, I had the good fortune of running into a very old family friend at a party and striking up a conversation about what I should do next. She was an early employee at LinkedIn and suggested I meet with some people over there who were building out their first inside sales org. Needless to say, I met some amazing people and this is where everything changed as they say. I’ve been in technology sales ever since. What I found out was that sales was something radically different than I had thought, and was something that I could find great satisfaction in. I’ve always been extremely passionate and interested in how things work, and I discovered sales was a path to getting behind the scenes and discovering how countless different businesses function. On top of that, I could bring in technology to help people fix, improve, and transform their businesses. That is what I ultimately fell in love with about technology and my career in sales.

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

Bitnami is exciting for me for so many reasons. First, I’ve always loved stories about companies that ‘punched above their weight’ so to speak. The companies that everyone’s heard of, but don’t realize how big of an impact they’ve had until you’re on the inside. As I began to peel back the layers I saw that while Bitnami was not a very large company it had incredible reach, partnerships, and influence. On top of that, all of the people that I met across the board were just downright impressive individuals. I know it’s cliche to say it’s the people, but it really was the case for me. I found a group of people that I wanted to learn from and build with. From a business standpoint I was fascinated by all of the unique skills and capabilities the company has, and the different areas this gives us an opportunity to be relevant in. From a technology standpoint, there were many things I found very interesting, but our work in Kubernetes was the most exciting to me. The company I was at prior to Bitnami relied heavily on Kubernetes - I saw up close the leverage and velocity it enabled for the business and knew I had to be involved with it in some capacity going forward.

What are you working on?

Right now I’m working on helping Bitnami bring all of our unique technology and expertise to the enterprise. Specifically I’m focused on our direct sales efforts, building alliances with partners, and our overall go-to-market strategy.

Enjoying the, "best meal of his life" while traveling with his wife!

What do you like to do for fun?

More than anything else, my wife and I love to travel and explore. We like to do that not only in far away places, but also find all those hidden gems right in our backyard. No matter where we are, I love to eat and cook... a lot. My most cherished possessions are probably my cast iron pan and Japanese knives if that gives you any idea. I also love to mountain bike and snowboard whenever I get the chance.

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

Meet the team: Felipe

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 Madrid, Felipe works remotely as a Kubernetes Engineers on our Kubernetes squad.

A Brief Bio

I was born and raised in Madrid. At the age of 8, I saw a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in a small shop near my house and I fell in love with it. I used it mostly to play games and connected to an old black and white TV. After playing with the system more, I started to get curious to about how it worked.

At that time there weren’t many computer magazines, but the few that did exist talked about games and how to hack games (do you remember poke and randomize usr?). Eventually, I was lucky enough to have my parents buy me an Amstrad CPC 6128, which is when I started to learn how to program. I even wrote a small stocks application for my father’s business, although he never got to use it because he preferred to run his business the old way. And then, one Christmas, after the 3 Kings Night, I received my first PC with 640KB of memory and a 20MB hard-disk drive and one 5 ¼” floppy drive. 

Fast-forward into the future, my life revolved around computers. I attended university in 1992 to study Computer Science, but quit soon afterwards and started to work for a financial company in 1997. Later on, I switched careers and moved into consulting and training to join Google in Zürich in 2006, then Telefónica in 2013 and now Bitnami in 2018.

I still remembers those days when there was no Internet, games were bought or traded with friends, and magazines mostly focused on low-level assembly or video games. Then, the modems (US Robotics) came. First 9,200 bauds, then 14,400, then 28,800 and finally 56k, using a POTS which I shared with my parents. There were so many times when my dial-up connection broke because my father tried to speak on the phone while I was using the modem. Then, circa 1992, I got my first 256 kbps ADSL connection, which changed everything. Not just because of the speed, but because of the price. The days of using CompuServer or the BBS were behind us. Then came Linux. I switched from Windows to Linux when the only Linux distro was the SLS. Then, Slackware, then RedHat, then I bought a Mac and I have been using macOS since then.

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

I switched because I want to work on bleeding-edge technology like Kubernetes, be part of a great community of engineers, and contribute to open-source. During the interview process, the team showed me of how cool Bitnami was and I was convinced that this was the place I needed to be. :-)

What are you working on?

I am one of the core engineers working on Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime, which adds additional functionality to an existing Kubernetes cluster. For instance, logging and alerting, ingress routing, automatic DNS name publishing for Kubernetes services, transparent TLS termination for HTTP/S traffic using Letsencrypt, etc.

This framework leverages existing open source components, maintained and packaged by Bitnami, with security and ease of use in mind, plus accompanying command-line tools and documentation to deploy and use.

If you'd like to be notified when it is released, sign-up here. 

Enjoying the outdoors with his family

 What do you like to do for fun?

I enjoy spending time with my family and friends, traveling to new (and not so new) places, and going hiking to the mountains.

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

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!

Meet the Bitnami team: Sameer Naik

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.

Sameer is an Engineer on the Kubernetes team, and works remotely from Goa, India.

A brief bio

I am from and India, living in the beautiful state of Goa. As a young boy I loved tinkering with electronics. I would often take them apart and put them back together. I had my first experience with computers at an early age (it was a PC with 233 MHz and 16 MB RAM running Windows 95) and I would often watch my brother try to get Linux running on it and write computer programs for it. My journey in the world of computer science had begun as soon as I started to write code myself.

After graduating with a Computer Science degree, I co-founded a hardware startup to work on multimedia devices and developing the software stack for the platforms. I enjoyed the startup work culture and after some very memorable years, I decided to pursue my new found interest in cloud and container technologies and found Bitnami to be the perfect fit to start my new journey.

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

When I came across Docker, I was fascinated by the potential of Linux containers in the software development and delivery life cycle. I began experimenting with the tool and in the process published images for GitLab and Redmine, which became very popular in the Docker community.

I wanted to learn more about software delivery, container orchestration and cloud platforms and in the process came across Bitnami. From that point, it was clear that Bitnami was the place where I could learn more about these technologies.

The container landscape has evolved rapidly and I am proud to say that Bitnami has made significant contributions in the space with its efforts around the Kubernetes, Helm projects, and more! We have been hiring some amazing engineers and our team has grown significantly over the last year as well, which has been exciting to see.

What are you working on?

I am a part of the Kubernetes team at Bitnami. Our sole focus is to always improve our offerings in the container space. We are very proud of the Kubeless and Monocular projects that we have contributed to the Kubernetes community and will continue to enhance the user experience for these tools.

Our team has contributed significantly to the Helm project and are consistently engaged with the user community to understand how users are deploying Linux containers in their infrastructure.

                                                                                  What do you like to do for fun?

I enjoy the company of my pets. I have four dogs, which is a lot fun. I am a avid gym goer and try to workout as often as possible.

I love food, especially middle eastern cuisine. Like every foodie, this one likes to cook.

I am a self taught guitarist and played in a college rock band. It's been a really really long time since I last touched a guitar. I intend to pick it up again soon :)

I have become interested in blockchain technologies and often spend time exploring the exciting new world of blockchain products and services.


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

Meet the Bitnami Team: Miranda Carter

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

Miranda is the Operations Manager on the Operations team, and works remotely from Vancouver, Washington. 

A brief bio

While I was in college, I took advantage of all of the internships that I could to enhance my skill set and narrow down all of the possible roles that I wanted to do in the workforce. As I went through each of my internships, I realized that I loved being a part of a company that was fast paced and was still in the stage of process creation instead of process enforcement.

As soon as I graduated, I started to look for my first full time job within start-ups, which is how I ended up at Bitnami as their Office Manager.

When I started 4 years ago, we had about 20 employees worldwide with only 5 of us in the San Francisco office that I managed. It was such an exciting time because I was able to learn first-hand about how the company ran while also helping to mold the company culture into a place that would now grow to over 70 people!

As our team has grown, so has my role. I am now the Operations Manager for the San Francisco office. My team covers the needs of our US-based team and all of our remote workers as well.

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

When looking for my new adventure, I was speaking with a few companies and Bitnami was the only one that really grabbed my attention. I knew that I wanted to work for a start-up, but Bitnami was the only company that seemed to have an actually long term plan for success and they were the only founders that I truly wanted to learn from. As time went on, that gut feeling rang true since I have learned more than I could have ever imagined during my time here.

Although it has been almost 4 years, I am still here because the ability to always learn something new has not gone away. Even as the team grows, each employee is encouraged to ask questions and join projects that they are interested in. With this type of company culture, boredom and complacency isn’t an option because things move too fast for you to ever settle down.

Remote-based working culture is one of the biggest aspects of why I am still here as well. Due to family circumstances, I needed to move away from San Francisco and to Vancouver, WA. At first, I thought that I would need to leave the company because of the move, but it turned out that the remote-based culture that Bitnami had built was strong enough to even allow an Operations person to get the job done from anywhere in the world.

The transition from working in the office to working remotely was seamless since all of the employees now understand how to work with remote team members.

Of course, as someone who used to work in the office everyday, I miss seeing everyone in-person, but I know that I will see them at least a few times a year. Also, the founders know the importance of this type of connection, which is why we have in-person engineering sprints a few times a year and the infamous yearly company all-hands trip!

What are you working on?

My team covers many different aspects of the company in order to make sure that daily operations run smoothly such as human resources, office management, recruiting, events and much more.

One of my current projects is focused on building an internal resource center for all company documentation, which will help increase knowledge sharing between all employees. I am using a tool called WorkRamp (seriously, the best tool) to create a company portal that includes all internal information, from our company handbooks to our marketing guidelines, to ensure that every single employee is able to gather the information that they need in one spot.

Enjoying some time at the beach with her little "family" 

What do you like to do for fun?

I am a dog and wine lover, so you can usually see me at an activity that includes either or both of those things during the weekend. One of my favorite places is the beach, so I am now spending the rest of the summer exploring the new Washington coast beaches that I haven’t been to before.




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

Meet the Bitnami Team: JuanJo Ciarlante

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

JuanJo is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer on the SRE team, which is part of the Kubernetes Squad, and works remotely from Argentina.

A brief bio

¿ Cómo funciona (How does it work) ?

I’ve been passionate about «how things work» since I was a child. I still recall how anxious I was when waiting for my father to bring home the latest issue of «Cómo funciona» magazine. Not surprisingly, many years later FOSS became the major driver in my career.

That token[ring card] that changed my life.

My 1st taste of Internet came thru a Metro-Area-Network at the govt department I was working at, c.a. 1995, in Mendoza/Argentina, where we got a “lease” for one of those shiny public IP addresses. Alas, it was linked via a single token-ring NIC installed in our Slackware Linux gateway box (an old IBM PS/2 we had recycled for that purpose). With no budget for a second TR NIC, several hundred dollars at that time and baby Linux 1.2 only supporting a single address per interface, it quickly became unsustainable to switch between our formal govt’s private address and the precious public one.

Hm … what about that ~2MB linux-1.3.xx.tar.gz source that’s written in that C language I had been tinkering with? After some weeks, many tries+rebuilds+crashes along the way, I had hacked up something beyond WFM, post-able to the linux-kernel mailing list -- with the help and feedback mainly from Alan Cox¹, we got ip_aliasing finally merged in linux-1.3.47 \o/

Since then I contributed to many other FOSS projects: Linux IP masquerading improvements, user/kernel space OpenSWAN crypto algo modularization, IPv6 transport support for OpenVPN, among other sparse bits.

Cloud-y times ahead.

In 2007 I joined Google at their Switzerland HQ as an SRE. By 2012 I had to return to my home country (was techlead of the GMail/Abuse-backends SRE team by that time) ... those times you’d want fork() to be a real-world thing.

Alas, an opportunity to work from home for Canonical had opened, which I was lucky enough to grab: joined as Webops/SRE, later CRE (Cloud-RE) to wheel OpenStack-s for fun and profit.

Being back home also allowed me to resume my courses at the Universidad de Mendoza - re-joining that synergy that comes from teaching↔learning.

During my career I had been so lucky to have great challenges, learn so much from my awesome colleagues, work+contribute to FOSS projects, what else could I ask for? →

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

→ Kubernetes 

I’d been missing a rock-solid cloud orchestration platform (yeah, every Xoogler misses Google’s Borg I guess), but then Kubernetes came to life! Then Bitnami -- with its focus on the application orchestration realm together with its strong involvement in k8s projects in like kubeless, helm and ksonnet/kubecfg -- made a perfect fit for me :))

I also love the company-wide team culture, how horizontally you can approach managers and founders, it’s a great place to work !

What are you working on?

As member of the SRE team, we are involved in a pretty diverse set of devops tasks and projects, while also actively contributing to our Kubernetes efforts - for example, I recently added integration tests to kubeless, which ended being quite a trip (riding Travis to spawn a kubernetes cluster for your tests to land-on is an interesting challenge).

What do you like to do for fun?

Hmm guess that bash 1-liners don’t count here, so let’s try something else :#)

I love cooking (yeah you may say that’s meal-Engineering, but I’d like to convince myself that’s not only that ;). I also enjoy travelling to learn from other people’s culture, art and nature.

I’ve recently joined a local runners’ group, which gives another way to enjoy the beautiful hills surrounding Mendoza.

¹FWIW Interesting thoughts and discussion with Alan Cox: he pushing me to come up with something that would not require extra tools than ifconfig, then telling me why my original choice of ‘/’ as a shell-friendly aliased interface separator (i.e. no ‘|’, ‘$’, etc) was actually a bad idea - hmm not many choices left:
@ ←nah, so email-ish
% ←ditto (uucp routing, anyone?)
. ←meh looks like a file extension
: ←yeah, available! - plus there’s no such thing as drive-names on *nix OSes, after all ;)

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

Meet the Bitnami Team: Rick Spencer

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.

Rick is our VP of Engineering, and works remotely from Washington DC.

A Brief Bio

I graduated college with degree in Philosophy in 1990, though I studied a good deal of psychology as well. I wanted a career that was focused on service, so my first jobs were in Community Mental Health providing support to people with serious persistent mental illnesses, helping them stay in their homes in the community, and out of homelessness or the hospital. I burned out after a 5 years of that, though, and went back to graduate school and got a Master's Degree in Human Factors Engineering.

I got married to my wife in 1991, and we have 2 "kids", 22 and 18 years old now.

I started programming when I was about 12 years old, using my school's TSR-80 computers. Eventually my parents bought us kids a Commodore 64, so I continued programming that as well. I kept programming on the side, learning Pascal and C along the way, until I got recruited to Microsoft in 1997 to work as a Usability Engineer in Visual Studio. I spent almost 10 years at Microsoft in various roles, but during that time I discovered that I am always at my best when my end users are developers.

I left Microsoft to pursue my interest in Open Source. After a year, I landed a job as the Engineering Manager for the Ubuntu Desktop. I graduated from that to Director of Engineering and finally VP of Ubuntu when I left in early 2016.

I managed many disciplines during my years before joining Bitnami, including Engineering, Sales, Design, Usability, Documentation, Localization and others. I managed small teams and teams of over 300 people.

I joined Bitnami in the spring of 2016 as VP of Engineering.

I have lived in Alexandria, VA, Seattle, WA, Toulouse, France, and now am living in Washington, DC.

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

As I said, I always feel I am at my best when my end users are developers. I was strongly attracted to Bitnami's portfolio of offerings for developers. I liked Daniel and Erica's approach to running the company in a responsible, but non-risk averse way. I was also attracted to the remote working aspects of the role, and the opportunity to build a strong remote culture. I also knew Erica through personal connections, and I greatly admired her business acumen and her leadership style. I believed in Daniel's strong vision for the future of the company.

Enjoying some time with co-workers during the all-hands

What excites me about working here is that the engineering team is now structured for success across 3 major product lines that we are developing, and that there seems to be a huge appetite in the community for what we are building. Our images fill pretty much every cloud market place, and our new products are getting a ton of interest and traction. Across the board, we have a very smart team, and the team is executing. For a person in my role, this is the really fun.

I also very much enjoy working on Open Source projects, and so I love working with Seb and the rest of the Kubernetes Squad when I can.

What are you working on?

I divide my time into a few buckets. As VP of Engineering, I need to do a lot of work to help teams get their jobs done, help them work together effectively, and also help get the message out to partners, customers, and the community.

We have a fairly unsung team called the Web Dev team. These people are really the glue that holds Bitnami together, but because of their diligence, they make their job seem easy. This team is responsible, of course, for maintaining all of Bitnami's web sites and tools. But they are also critical in that they do work to integrate our image build systems with all the cloud marketplaces. This takes a lot of work to just figure out how to do the integration, and they often do it with crazy time pressures to help customers hit their deadlines. I don't spend too much time with this team because they are just so good at their jobs.

We have an Assets Team who has many responsibilities. One of the main ones is to design and build cloud images, VMs, containers, Multi-tier templates and other assets that end users can just use as is, or extend for their development environments. That team is responsible for making sure our users and our customers are very happy with what we are building. They are currently doing a great job at that, but they are also working every iteration to get more efficient and better at producing what they produce. I don't personally spend too much time with this team anymore, as they are really running well.

We are working on a lot of Kubernetes offerings, for example, Kubeless, Monocular, kubecfg, containers, etc... I spend a certain amount of time working with different communities on those projects, as well as explaining what we are doing to partners and potential future customers. So, I spend a lot of time advocating for this team.

I am spending a large amount of my time on our Enterprise product. We have a productized version of our own toolchain that we are developing for two different markets. I spend a lot of time working with this team to ensure that they have everything they need to achieve the vision, as well responding to feedback, input, scheduling difficulties, unexpected opportunities, etc... I spend a copious amount of time working with external partners and potential customers to understand how this toolchain will benefit them, though. The more traction we get in these discussions, the more time this takes.

Of course, the bulk of my job is listening to my team to help them strategize how to solve problems and achieve goals, to help ensure that the whole team is working together effectively, ensure everyone understands the strategy and help them align to it, etc... I spend a LOT of time in video conferences ;)

Finally, we are continuing to grow, so recruiting is, of course, a big focus for me.

What do you like to do for fun?

Honestly, I work a lot and I work hard. So, when I do have time for fun, I like to really relax. This might involve playing video games, or playing my Mandolin. My father made me a beautiful mountain dulcimer, so I am looking forward to spending some time to learn to play that. I am incredibly happy that Season 3 of Rick and Morty has started.

When I go on vacation, I like to go swim and get some sun. This summer I am going to Barbados to surf.

Interested in working with Rick at Bitnami? Apply for one of our open positions!

Meet the Bitnami Team: Ara Pulido Manuel de Villena

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.

Ara is our Engineering Manager on the Kubernetes Squad, and works remotely from Malaga.

Enjoying a bike ride in Berlin’s Tempelhof
Park (old Tempelhof airport) last summer.

A Brief Bio

I was born and raised in Andalusia, in the south of Spain. Since I was little I enjoyed computers and I started some very simple programming (using BASIC) in a family owned Amstrad CPC when I was around 9. When I had to choose what to do in college, the answer was easy.

During my university years, I joined the local Linux user group and it was then when my interest on infrastructure and this operating system started. At the beginning of my professional career my duties were not related to Linux, though; I did things like web programming, .NET and Java on my first few jobs. After those, I joined Canonical to help with test automation of their Ubuntu devices and managed several engineering teams throughout the years. I joined Bitnami in June 2017.

I work remotely from Málaga, a city in Spain mainly known as the city where Picasso was born.

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

As I said before, infrastructure in general and Linux in particular are my main interests in computing. I was very interested in Bitnami when I heard what the company was creating, the customers they had and the way they improved how people deployed applications in the cloud.

When I heard the strategy they had for the next wave of deploying applications, with containers and Kubernetes, I was sold. It is super exciting to be working on cutting edge technologies that will become the standard of application deployment alongside such an excellent group of engineers, many of whom contribute regularly upstream to the different projects.

If this was not enough, you quickly understand how Bitnami has a clear and proven business model, making it a sustainable company that is here to stay.

What are you working on?

I manage the Kubernetes squad, where we focus on creating production ready container images that are optimized to run on Kubernetes. Apart from creating the images, we work on several Kubernetes open source projects that help teams deploy their applications to a Kubernetes clusters (Monocular, Helm charts, Kubeless, Ksonnet).

As part of the my team’s duties and to make sure we eat our own dogfood, we run our internal Kubernetes cluster that we use at Bitnami to deploy our different internal and external applications. As part of the effort of running our own cluster, we come up with ideas and tools on how to better deploy applications, that we then open source. Kubecfg, a tool to manage complex Kubernetes environments as code, was first created as part of that effort, to improve the way we managed our cluster.

What do you like to do for fun?

I love going out with friends for tapas-style lunch, while we enjoy Málaga’s great weather. I love listening to live music anywhere, from small theaters or venues, to big outdoors music festivals.

I enjoy nature: snorkeling during summer and hiking during autumn and spring. Málaga surroundings are great for both, with clean waters in the Maro area, and great hiking paths in the mountains nearby like Sierra de Las Nieves.

Interested in working with Ara at Bitnami? Apply for one of our open positions!

Meet the Bitnami Team: Michael Nelson

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.

Michael is a Senior Engineer on the Tools team, and works remotely from Australia.

Michael working from one of his favorite view points

A brief bio

I love learning from others and helping people learn - whether it's technology, science or otherwise. I came originally from a computer science and physics background and have been engineering software in a different contexts for years, more recently around devops and cloud automation tooling. Like most software engineers, I'm always curious to see if we can find a simple(r) solution to a complex problem.

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

Technologies, people, and working from home.

I've come from a great company but one which had very specific tooling and technologies (and specifically no Kubernetes or cloud platforms outside of OpenStack in my role, at the time), so I was very keen to join one of the companies at the forefront of Kubernetes, with projects like Kubeless - a Kubernetes native serverless framework, as well as tooling in a plethora of cloud platforms.

I also had a number of contacts already at Bitnami who had mentioned how friendly the team at Bitnami is, as well as the approachability of the founders. And in my first two months that has been the case - the people and teams I've interacted with have been incredibly helpful getting me settled in, contributing code and get organised for a trip to the office - despite time-zone difficulties.

Finally, I've been working from home for nearly ten years now and although it does have some drawbacks, personally the benefits outweigh the drawbacks by a large margin. Bitnami is gradually supporting a larger proportion of remote workers and is very focussed on remote-friendly communication - whether that be ensuring meeting recordings are available quickly after the event or encouraging all discussions via email and slack so remote employees don't miss out.

And no, I don't generally work from a look-out as shown in the photo, but do sit and work from cafes or a library with similar views :)

What are you working on?

I'm currently part of a team that is focused on creating a new product to simplify cloud migration and automate some of the software delivery process for enterprise developers. Using the internal tooling that automates the build, release and maintenance of Bitnami’s catalog of containers and virtual-machine images for every major cloud provider, we are designing a solution that will allow software developers to apply automation to their own in-house applications.

This project requires that I review and repackage existing code and tools in collaboration with Bitnami engineers spread across multiple offices and remote locations.

What do you like to do for fun?

It would be hard to live in the Blue Mountains near Sydney and not enjoy getting outdoors, hiking, bike riding and the like. In addition to these things I love playing Ultimate Frisbee once a week with a bunch of other people who work locally (I find I need strategies like this to get out when I enjoy the work I do from home), experimenting with new technology, sharing books with my kids and baking sourdough breads.

Interested in working with Michael and Bridget? Apply for one of our open positions!

Meet the Bitnami Team: Bridget McErlean

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.

Bridget is an Engineer on the Tools team, and works remotely from Bristol in the UK.

Bridget enjoying a hike in Yosemite  

A brief bio

I grew up Northern Ireland and moved to Bristol in 2007 to study Computer Science. I had been interested in computers and technology from a young age but I actually didn't start programming until I started my degree. Once I got started though, I knew that that was what I wanted to do!

After graduation, I decided to stay in Bristol as I really loved the city. I joined SN Systems (a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment) to work on the toolchain for PlayStation consoles having developed an interest in compiler technology while at university. I learned a lot during my time there but as I attended more and more meetups in the area, I realised that there was still so much for me to learn. I started to hear more about cloud and container technologies and so I made the decision to look for a new opportunity and later joined ClusterHQ and then Bitnami.

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

Over the course of my career, I have become interested not only in how we develop tools but also in the impact of user and developer experience when using them. I found it really exciting to be able to join a company that is working to make it easy for users to get started with the software they want to use. I wanted to contribute to creating that great experience.

Bitnami also seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to use the skills that I had learnt through previous roles and build upon them. There are challenging problems to solve, new technologies to learn, and a fantastic team to work with and learn from, all of which I find really motivating.

I was a bit nervous joining as a remote employee but I really shouldn’t have been. Everyone has worked hard to make me feel welcome and part of the team, and they are always searching for ways to improve and make that experience better. The welcome GIF that my team made for me for my first day is still one of my favourite things!

What are you working on?

During my time at Bitnami, I’ve primarily focused on improving the internal tools that we use for testing the applications that we package. Since Bitnami packages applications for so many different platforms, it’s important to make our testing consistent so that the experience is consistent for our users regardless of which platform they use. My team works closely with the team responsible for testing those packaged applications and keeping them up to date to try and make that testing process as easy as possible. I will soon be joining a new team to contribute to the development of the tools that we use to automate the build and release of our containers and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to work with new people and learn about new technologies.

What do you like to do for fun?

I really enjoy crafts, particularly knitting and crochet, and have also recently been dabbling in calligraphy. I have a tendency though to collect more supplies than I will need! I also like to travel and recently had a trip to the US where I got to hike in some of the beautiful national parks, go on some amazing roller coasters, and see a rocket launch at the Kennedy Space Center!


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

Meet the Bitnami Team: James Westby

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.

James Westby is a Senior Engineer working remotely from Bristol, UK.

James and his wife enjoying a vacation in Iceland

A brief bio

I am always keen to learn new things and I’ve been lucky that my career so far has allowed me to work in different areas of software. Most of my time was spent at Canonical where I started working on Ubuntu itself, dealing more different languages and build systems than I can remember, and on the Bazaar version control system where I was able to learn Python in more depth. Over the next few years I spent time working with Linaro, and then on web service development and deployment, with a couple of spells as a team lead. After Canonical I spent a short time at an ill-fated Docker startup.




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

I joined Bitnami as I am excited by the opportunities that Bitnami has. The technology, partnerships and leadership are almost unrivalled, and that presents a great opportunity for my work to have greater impact. The range of work that Bitnami does also provides a great learning opportunity to me. Since joining I’ve already learned Ruby, nodejs, Go and Kubernetes, and that’s just the beginning. Lastly the capacity for change within the company is huge, it’s always improving in many different ways. This was particularly important to me as when I joined there were few remote employees, but the company has put the time and effort into improving the experience for us. There’s still of course many places we can improve, but every new person that joins brings fresh ideas, and the company is willing to adapt to incorporate them.

What are you working on?

Currently I am working on improving the automation of how we build our containers and cloud images. We need to be able to add more applications to our catalog and produce more types of images for each with sub-linear growth in the manual work that is involved. We are always working on this in some manner, but currently we have a team working on a big change in this area. For me it involves working on many different areas, involving scripts and build systems, web services, docker containers, automated testing and documentation and training.

What do you like to do for fun?

I’m currently spending a lot of time running and cycling as I’m trying to improve my fitness and my 5k and 10k personal bests. Otherwise I really enjoy food, beer, gaming and travel. My wife and I recently travelled to Iceland, which had amazing sights, as well as some great food and beer.

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

Meet the Bitnami Team: Angus Lees

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.

Angus Lees is one of our Senior Engineers who works remotely from Australia.

A brief bio

I have been lucky enough to spend my entire career working with Linux and Free Software (since 1995), and in a lot of ways Bitnami is a return to my early interests.

From early university days running the Linux user group “installfests”, I have been a proud member of the Debian project since about 2000. From university, I worked for a string of small Australian companies as a sysadmin / programmer / everything-else-guy. One of the more interesting projects involved driving over sand dunes in the hottest Australian desert to install our Linux-based routers on poles with solar panels and a two-way satellite dish.

In 2005, I moved to Ireland to work for Google on one of the original SRE teams. We looked after the main search engine and common networking infrastructure. I and 2 others built ipv6.google.com and as part of the following rollout, my home was the first place to ever receive a AAAA response from www.google.com. I eventually moved back to the new Google Sydney office to work on a new storage system and finally as a team lead and manager for some of the parts of the new Google cloud overlay network.

By this point, it was becoming obvious that a number of the engineering candidates I was interviewing were mentioning projects and tools that I had never heard of. My eldest daughter was about to start university and talked about leaving home soon, and so I took the rather unusual step of leaving Google to work from home on OpenStack with Rackspace. I accidentally got involved in Kubernetes quite early (v0.15) by writing the Kubernetes OpenStack cloud provider plugin and some related pieces and really enjoyed the experience. The opportunity to work on Kubernetes full time for Bitnami came up and I jumped at it.

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

I have always had a fascination with compilers, toolchains, and the low-level details of how applications interact with kernel and hardware. Bitnami has been working in this space for many years, and so it seemed an obvious fit.

For me, Bitnami is almost the perfect combination of: working from home, on free software, on something new and exciting, without big corporate bureaucracy, and with an excellent bunch of colleagues.

What are you working on?

I am currently working on “ksonnet” - a set of related tools to make it easier to manage more complex services on Kubernetes. This grew out of personal experience setting up and managing multiple internal Kubernetes clusters within Bitnami, and a decade of something similar within Google. I feel Kubernetes is rapidly moving from “demo” to “production” for many people, so I am happy to be able to share tools and a workflow that can really take advantage of the Kubernetes design.

What do you like to do for fun?

I like food. I have a small vegetable garden and a few chickens. With no daily commute, I like to spend that little bit of extra time in the evenings cooking and enjoying a nice meal with my family.

I have never been a sporting person, but I have also recently started playing soccer/football.

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

Meet the Bitnami Team: Sebastien Goasguen

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.

Sebastien Goasguen is our Senior Director of Cloud Technologies and an avid outdoor sports enthusiast.

Sebastien and his family enjoying a visit to Camp Nou

A brief bio: 

I am not a freshman anymore so I have done a few things. I spent a long time in academia, not only getting a Ph-D (2001), but after that I stuck around and only left in 2012 when I joined Citrix. I had the chance to work on some big grid computing projects in the US and in Europe, I spent couple summers at CERN working on their first cloud, then I worked on CloudStack for a while, before writing the O’Reilly Docker cookbook. That was the signal for me that it was time to take a chance.

I discovered Kubernetes while writing the book, fell in love with the system and decided to create Skippbox. It was a major challenge doing it out of Europe and with a handful of remote engineers, but I am very proud of what we managed to accomplish with almost nothing. As a fun bio fact, in 2009 , the European Space Agency recruited a new set of Astronauts. I applied and made it to the first selection in Hamburg, unfortunately I stopped there. Imagine, Bitnami could have had an engineer in space, talk about being remote!

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

I joined Bitnami because it was a perfect fit to get Skippbox to the next level. I knew that we needed to grow to have a more significant impact (4 engineers is not enough). Bitnami has a strong foundation and is focusing on applications. When we look at our industry, I feel that the Cloud is fulfilling its promise to make infrastructure a utility, it is time to go back to applications. Containers and systems like Kubernetes make that switch natural. As you start using them you immediately forget about the infrastructure and think about the apps.

It is this focus on applications that I liked about Bitnami. They have delivered apps on bare-metal, VM, Clouds and now are delivering apps to new formats. I wanted to help them do that as well as pioneer some new applications framework like serverless.

I also have to admit that I liked the fact that Bitnami had strong european DNA and was operating for the long term, helping customers navigate these evolutions of technologies and software practices. It is not just about the latest fancy tech, it is about applications environments for the long term.

What are you working on? 

I lead our container and Kubernetes efforts. This involves everything related to building awesome containers: Make sure that we follow best practices, have small image sizes, are automatically updated and run well on any container platform. It also means all our Kubernetes upstream activities in the open source community, things like our involvement with Helm charts, Monocular, and of course Kubeless. Kubeless is our new serverless framework, that I started with Tuna at Skippbox. Kubeless fits well with the overall apps strategy of Bitnami so we are continuing our effort. We hope to build a solid community around it and stay close to the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Generally speaking, since we see applications moving towards a container format and a Kubernetes deployment environment, I lead all our efforts in that space to make sure we do a great job for our users and also help the community grow by contributing directly to the ecosystem.

What do you like to do for fun? 

I am a sports guy, a bit out of shape these days but sports is my definition of fun. I get out of my house and I go run, bike, hike, camp. I just bought a new mountain bike and I am slowly shaping up to be able to climb the Jura. If everything goes well I will be back in shape to run a half-marathon in the fall. I have ran 6 marathons dating back to Chicago in 2004. I ran the Chamonix Marathon in 2011, which was an 8 hour “fast” hike with 7500 feet of climb (2600+ meters). I also play golf a couple times a year, my wife being a Golf teacher we hang out at golf courses quite a bit, and I usually hit couple buckets of balls every week, it is good to get out of the office (or shall I say basement).

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