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: Liesse Jones

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 our San Francisco office, Liesse is our Office Manager and Executive Assistant to the CEO and COO of Bitnami.

A Brief Bio

After attending design school in Toronto, I moved back to the US and started managing businesses in the beauty and fashion sector. I discovered that I loved working with people and helping them reach their personal and professional goals. When I decided to transition to the tech industry it was really important to me to find a place where I could continue to do this and also be encouraged to reach my fullest professional potential. I have definitely found this at Bitnami.

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

At Bitnami, our company values are the guiding light for everything that we do. Make It So, Team Up, Empower Users, Value Simplicity, and Stay Curious. As part of the Operations team, I’m encouraged to take ownership of projects, come up with straightforward solutions, and help the entire company succeed. I love that questions are celebrated here and that we are all excited to learn new things each day.

What are you working on?

Just a small glimpse of our new office

We just recently moved to a beautiful new office in the Jackson Square neighborhood of San Francisco. For the past few months, I had been working non-stop on this office move project and I am excited to finally share the new space with our team.

There’s a lot of glass and natural light in the new office and I’m really excited to see how that energizes all of the current and new employees that we are bringing to the team. Creating a
productive and peaceful work environment is something that I feel really strongly about.

Now that the office move is over, I will have the opportunity to work closely with the marketing team to help them with projects like social media and our monthly newsletter. I look forward to #teamingup and growing my skill set while still keeping the SF office afloat with my Office Manager duties.

What do you like to do for fun?

After work you’ll usually find me at a yoga class or searching for the best tacos in San Francisco. I love spending time outside on a sunny weekend and exploring museums on grey days.

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

Meet the team: Randy Chang

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 our San Francisco office, Randy works on our Accounting team as our Controller.

A Brief Bio

I was born in Los Angeles but moved around a lot as a kid.  I was blessed with the opportunity to experience multiple cultures in my developmental years, living in Paraguay, Taiwan, and Singapore.  This has taught me that the world is larger that what we know it as and everything comes with perspective.

All the movement growing up shook my focus, and I was constantly bored in my studies and academics. My mother, being a tiger parent always wanted a doctor, lawyer and an accountant in the family. My sister became a surgeon, my brother an attorney, and I was left with slim pickings.

I studied business administration/accounting at San Francisco State, juggling full-time work and school for 6 years.  In those years, I funded my college education through online poker, worked at a regional tax firm (through a partner who I met at the tables) and developed a regional market for a consumer goods company.

Enjoying the sites in Sydney

Being in San Francisco, growth companies were the hype and I had to see what it was about.  I joined as an accountant and quickly fell in love with fast-paced high-growth startups.  In a short amount of time, I went through a series of acquisitions and promotions and landed as the Finance Director for a pre-IPO Marketing technology company.

In 2014, I flew to Taiwan for my 10-year high school reunion where I met my now wife.  In the span of 36 months, I’ve uprooted 3 times, living in Sydney, London and Toronto, got married, travelled the world, while managing the finance and operations of a midsize company.




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

I joined Bitnami because I felt like I could add a lot of value to an organization that I’m used to working in.  I think Bitnami is at a very interesting point in its maturity and has major potential.

What excites me the most is the opportunity to work with people from different cultures and backgrounds. To me, one of my greatest joys is collaborating with various teams on cross-functional projects.

What are you working on?

As the controller, I work closely with Philip and Susana to ensure the finances are in order.  Aside from managing cash, spend, and financial reporting, I work with internal and external stakeholders to ensure information is reported in a timely and orderly fashion.

This translates to is making sure the company has visibility into all aspects of the business, which means I will partner with all teams to gather, parse, analyze and deliver the information that is requested.

What do you like to do for fun?

These days I like to go to the gym and spend time with my wife and my parents. I can enjoy a good hike, camping, golf, water sports, or scuba diving. And I can talk about anything, but can really enjoy a conversation about commerce, people, or travel.

Interested in working with Bitnami and Randy? 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: Simon Bennett

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.

Simon Bennett is our VP of Product, leading our product vision, engaging with customers and helping the engineering team deliver awesome product to our customers.

A brief bio

I originally hail from the UK where I studied computer science and began my professional career working on projects in retail, financial services and a long-extinct category of company called “dotcoms” 

The picture to the left was one of the first projects I worked on while finishing my degree at the University of Southampton. It felt very futuristic at the time.

I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2002, lured by the huge number of software companies and the freedom to snowboard or surf at the weekend depending on the season.

Somewhere along the way I got interested in the “business side” and switched from pure engineering management to product management. I really enjoy working on building durable businesses that produce valuable software products for lots of people.

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

During my time at VMware working on the personal desktop products I loved being able to make hundreds of thousands of developers and professionals more productive. Working for large, well-known company has many benefits, but I missed the dynamic nature of smaller companies where an individual team’s results directly affects the health of the business as a whole.

At Bitnami, I feel like I have the best of both worlds - the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of users to make them more productive, plus, a dynamic and passionate team willing to experiment, execute, and learn what our users and partners need every single day.

The caliber and passion of the people at Bitnami means I’m always learning something new - whether it’s “how to run an excellent meetup” from our operations team, or “the latest trends in immutable software infrastructure” from our globally distributed team of architects and engineers.

What are you working on?

One of my current projects is analysing the results from our annual user survey. I’m trying to understand what our users love about Bitnami today and where we can improve. Our industry is being revolutionized by the move to cloud computing and it’s a privilege to have the insights from over 17,000 survey respondents to guide our strategy and investments.

I’m also spending time getting hands on with our automated packaging system, which has been significantly upgraded in the last few months. We intend to make parts of that system available outside Bitnami to tackle new use-cases. In doing so I’m learning that having a team distributed throughout the world means that Bitnami, in a literal sense, never sleeps.

                                                                               

What do you like to do for fun?

I typically have 3-4 different projects on the go at any given time, often an art, building or electronics project with one of my boys. When time permits, I’m likely to be outside - exploring the city, heading to the mountains or the beach.

Interested in working with Simon 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: Alejandro Ruiz

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.

Alejandro is one of our Engineers on the Tools team, and works in our Seville office.

                                                                                                        

Alejandro enjoying a hike in Yosemite during his trip to the US

A brief bio

I am from a small town in the south of Andalusia, Villamartín, but I’ve been living in Seville for the last 7 years. It was such a big change for me given all the things I can do here but it’s still a great place to live in.

I am passionate about technology in general, but have a love for computers and smartphones in particular. I got my first computer when I was 6 years old and since then I haven’t stopped learning about them. I like to ask myself why things works as they do, and apply logic to solve problems. I also like to customize the tools I use in my daily work, and I dedicate quite a lot of time to it.


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

My first experience with Bitnami was during Bitnami’s first bootcamp that took place almost 3 years ago. At the time, I was finishing my Telecommunication Engineering masters degree. This bootcamp was a challenging 1-month course that included daily classes that covered a wide variety of topics. We learned everything from the Linux command line basics to how to securely deploy and configure applications using the multiple stacks supported by Bitnami installers, in addition to how to operate cloud instances or use containers.

This course gave me the opportunity to learn a lot of new things, which is something that I truly appreciate. After the bootcamp, I was offered a job as an engineer and I’ve been here ever since.

This company has made me feel like I was a member of the team since day one, which creates a great and trusting work environment that I enjoy being a part of everyday.

What are you working on?

I am currently working on the CI/CD pipelines for our new assets. This is very exciting because I get to build tools that will make the life of our internal teams much easier. My work touches very different parts of our internal infrastructure, so I get to learn intimately how everything works together. In addition to my primary job, I work closely with other teams and actively participate in the design and planning sessions for our future products. It is important to have a global view of where the company is going so you can contribute effectively.

What do you like to do for fun?

I love to play football, but I rarely have time for it. In my spare time, I like to play computer games, watch TV series, and travel.

I’ve recently visited Germany and The Netherlands and both of them were awesome. Looking forward to my next adventure this summer!

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

Meet the Bitnami Team: Tom McCafferty

Tom enjoying one of his favorite hobbies 

Meet one of the newest members of our team, Tom McCafferty, and learn why he choose to join the Bitnami Team as our VP of Marketing. 

Why I joined Bitnami…

I’ve spent the bulk of my career in product marketing which means I’ve spent a lot of time telling stories to customers, prospects, writers, industry analysts and partners (anyone who would listen) about companies, products and technology trends. And most of the time, if done well, the narrative creates a grand perception of whomever/whatever the story is about. I’ve told stories of small startups disrupting industry giants, I’ve told stories of changing infrastructure dynamics, I’ve written extensively on the future of communications and the impact of virtualization, automation and cloud computing. The dirty secret of marketing is that more often than not, the stories are just that….stories. Ok, they are generally rooted in some truth or some future truth (roadmaps) but are rarely representative of the actual state of the product or company.

In the case of a startup, creating a meaningful story can be especially difficult. Most of the time the foundational elements are not fully covered:

1. Do they have proven product(s)?

2. Is there a market for their products? Have they identified it?

3. Do they have customers? Are they meaningful customers?

4. Are they making money? Is it a sustainable business model?

5. Are they innovating? Is there a future opportunity?

When a friend first introduced me to Bitnami, I was absolutely blown away by the story they have to tell. Not only are they the clear leader in application packaging, they’ve applied that expertise to delivering cloud-ready and cloud-native application catalogs for every leading cloud provider (check out the list) in the world driving over 1 million new deployments per month. And they’ve built a profitable and rapidly growing business doing that. They’ve also had the foresight to leverage their internal know-how in building and publishing applications to productize application packaging tools for enterprise developers and system integrators to help businesses on their cloud migration journey. If that weren’t enough, they’re also driving innovations in the container ecosystem with open source kubernetes projects centered on packaging and discovering applications as well. Those are just the things that I can share today, there is so much more to come.

As I complete my second week as VP of Marketing at Bitnami I’m collecting data on products and buyers (there are many), evaluating the landscape of competitors (there are few) and defining ways to hone the story here to continue the momentum and accelerate the success that this team has had to date. I’m used to being in a position where there are gaps in the answers to those 5 questions above, not great answers to all of them. I’m hesitant to say that this makes my job an easy one, but I can confidently say that I am extremely excited about the opportunity to help Bitnami tell their story to the world.

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

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!

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!