What does your technical path look like?
I started 10 years ago at Schibsted Tech Polska as a PHP Developer. After a couple of years, more and more teams started experimenting with Node.js, including the team I was part of at the time. In the meantime, I was appointed as Engineering Manager and Tech Lead for some time. A couple of years ago, I felt burned out, so instead of doing rage-quit, I talked about it with my manager – and he suggested that I focus more on DevOps stuff. This was challenging enough, so I became a DevOps Engineer and, after some time, took over the whole show and became Head of DevOps at the organization to which my team belongs.
What was your biggest technical challenge?
The team I worked with is responsible for keeping the lights on and making sure we deliver (and deliver always fresh) content to our readers in the biggest newspapers in Norway and Sweden. I remember a situation when the risk of cutting undersea cables connecting Scandinavia to the rest of the world was quite high. One of the leaders called in the meeting with most of the operations people and said „Now, it’s not only about downtime and lost revenues. It’s about social safety – we need to make sure we stay up. People need to be informed in order to feel safe”. It gave me a greater sense of the work I’m responsible for.
What technologies do you use on a daily basis in the project?
For tooling, it’s all the various services from AWS, Github Actions for CI/CD pipelines, Varnish (fun fact – the Varnish project started in VG, which is a part of Schibsted!) for CDN, and Node.js/Python for all the various scripts that I need to make.
How would you describe your usual day at work?
The first thing is to make sure I’m up to date with what’s going on – checking Slack messages, email inbox, and opening some of our newspapers webpages. Then, we have team sync (over video, cause the team is working in different locations). After this, I’m usually jumping into various meetings – 1:1s with my direct reports, syncs with stakeholders, brainstorming sessions with my team or developers from other teams, and talks with the Security department. If there are no meetings, I’m still enjoying getting my hands dirty and contributing to some tasks that my team is currently working on.
What do you value most about working at Schibsted Tech Polska?
Scandinavian way of working. People are respectful, value others’ opinions, and pay a lot of attention to work-life balance. Also, the focus is on delivering complete features with good quality, rather than sacrificing quality in favor of delivering on deadlines.
What did you want to do as a child?
I always enjoyed being on the road, so jobs like driver or freight forwarder was something pretty interesting for me. And then I ended up in the IT business.
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