Hello Joran! First of all, can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about yourself?
Hello PriceHubble! I'm Joran (if you're wondering - it's pronounced like Jordan but without a D ;), I'm almost 31 and I'm Swiss. I grew up in Lausanne, studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) and graduated with a bachelor in mechanical engineering and a master in robotics. However, my school years have not always been brilliant, with a total of 3 years repeated (at 12, 16 and 24). This taught me a lot about the importance of our environment in failure or success.
After 6 years in Zurich for my studies, I immersed myself in the Ethereum blockchain and got my first job in Lausanne, in a ticketing company where I participated in the development of a mobile application for UEFA, based on a private Ethereum blockchain. Then I joined a security company, to participate in the development of a platform that offered clients turnkey blockchain solutions. This is where I took an intense dive into cloud infrastructure and microservices. My discovery of Kubernetes! Then I joined PriceHubble, 1 year ago.
From a personal point of view, it's simple: I love being outside. Whether it's on a bike, walking, on a boat, in the mountains or in the lake, where I go swimming in the morning before going to work ;). My wife, Emilia, is from Argentina, and my sister lives in New York, so I have plenty of excuses to travel ;). My best travel memory is climbing the Iztaccíhuatl volcano in Mexico: we left at 3am to see the sunrise - an amazing experience. And for the summer, nothing beats the beaches of Sardinia!
What is your life and work like at PriceHubble?
My job has changed a lot since I joined a year ago!
At the beginning, I was working exclusively with my boss (our CTO) on a very specific scope: I worked on automating the deployment of our products by revisiting our helm charts and our CI/CD pipelines. A big project as soon as I arrived. Today, many of my projects involve the integration of Google Cloud services, brick by brick, service by service: we integrate them together and build PriceHubble... So today I’m spending a lot of my time identifying the products that meet our needs and planning their integration (loads balancer, customer management, databases, big data and machine learning, cloud architecture, observability). When the SRE team grew in November with the arrival of a new colleague, I took on the responsibility of leading it. We are now looking for our 3rd musketeer!
As SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) I work with all the guilds: frontend, backend, data ... we deal with security issues, managing cloud environments, optimising CI/CD pipelines, ensuring the observability of our services and providing developers with all the tools they need, all in the context of a (very) fast growing company. To give you an idea, today we are running more than 100 pipeline executions per day.
We are the internal reference centre for cloud and microservices architecture, and are in charge of our platform vision and key technology choices. Our challenge today is to transform the way we operate. In the future, the SRE team's priority will be to improve our teams’ efficiency by providing them with an ecosystem that makes their jobs easier. Our choices really influence the way teams operate and work in the field.
What do you enjoy most about working here with us?
First of all, I have a lot of freedom and trust. I am free to organise my working time as I wish, the goals are defined together and only the result counts. I have the freedom to test many of my ideas. This is essential for me.
A recent example of the trust and freedom you can enjoy internally? This year I worked from Argentina for three months, the time for me to get married! This was not a problem at all internally, our collaborative tools allow for this type of situation even if it is exceptional.
I also appreciate the way things work internally: our management leads by example, we are empowered and autonomous. Once I had proved myself, I was able to take on responsibilities very quickly.
Finally, the technologies we use are very stimulating and the business is also very interesting. The products we work on are innovative and concrete, which gives us a sense of purpose.
Why would you recommend other talents to join the SRE team at PriceHubble?
Of course the freedom, being in touch with a lot of internal teams, being at the core of a company that is growing very fast and has a strong international footprint, and working with technologies that I am passionate about: there are a lot of opportunities to grow and evolve! Personally, I've learned so much in the last year, that's what I wish for everyone.
