Showing posts with label toolchain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toolchain. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

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!

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

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!