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!

Now Available in Bitnami: SonarQube!

We are pleased to announce the release of SonarQube, the open source continuous code quality review suite used by enterprise development teams across the globe!

SonarQube is able to deeply analyze code on multiple dimensions for over twenty of the most popular languages such as Java, C, and PHP.

Combining static and dynamic analysis tools, SonarQube continuously monitors code along seven axes such as coding standards, potential bugs, code duplication, and complexity. It has built-in dashboards that enable managers and developers to efficiently find problem areas in their code.

SonarQube is available to launch now in Bitnami. To get started taking your code to the next level in just a few clicks, you can deploy SonarQube in the cloud, as a virtual machine, or with a native installer. 

You can also launch a one-hour demo in the cloud, absolutely free, by clicking the link below (requires a Bitnami account).



If you have any questions about using SonarQube, check out the Bitnami Documentation or post a message in our Community Forums. 

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!