Do you want to learn more about what it’s like working as an ePages developer? Well, then you can find it out in this new series of articles. Serena (our Technical Recruiter) and Birgit (our Technical Writer) interviewed their developer colleagues in the R&D team to “squeeze” information about their work life at ePages.
Here’s Domingo’s story:
Hi, my name is Domingo. I’m 25 years old and I come from Spain. I’m working as a Ruby Developer at ePages since July 2015. How did I end up at ePages in Hamburg? Well, it started with a friend of mine, who introduced me to ePages. I sent in my application and managed to get an interview with Harm Behrens, the CTO, who happened to be in the Barcelona office at that time. It was a good opportunity to meet with him in person. As part of the interview process, I was also given a coding challenge (via codility). And what shall I say… here I am! I’m now a member of the Tools Team.
Why Hamburg?
Why not? Hamburg is a beautiful city.
How did you feel when you arrived at the Hamburg Airport?
I felt hungry and asked myself: I need food. How can I ask for food in German?
What happened then? Did you get food?
I got a “Berliner” and then took a taxi to ePages. I collected the keys to my temporary apartment (and also ate some fruits from the fruit basket in the office). Before I finally started my job, I had a whole week time to organise all the paperwork for my residence in Germany.
Did you get any support with that?
Yes, Kristina, the office assistant, went to the registration office with me. And she was always there whenever I needed assistance.
What about bank accounts and health insurance?
Well, I opened an account at “Deutsche Bank” and I have the health insurance at “TK Krankenkasse”. Both have English service so it was okay to manage that on my own.
What is your impression about the first months working here?
I’m the pioneer of the team. The team was built from scratch, so it was just me. So I set up my computer, opened my already existing Kanban board and started working on the tickets right away. Timo, the team’s Product Owner, explained about the projects I would be facing and what had to be improved. I have a lot of independence and at the same time had to learn a lot on my own.
The people at ePages are great. I felt welcome right from the start. My office mate is Birgit. She’s a TechWriter and I support her with the internal tool, she’s using for the Software Documentation. We also used to share the office with Bernardo. He’s one of our Scrum Masters in Hamburg. But he has moved to another room to also be in contact with another team he’s taking care of. It’s fun working together and there’s always someone visiting us in our office.
What does a typical work day look like?
I’m usually in the office at 9:30. Then I check my tasks and see what’s planned for the day.
At 10:00 I have a daily meeting with Timo to check the status of the projects, any blockers and new or urgent tasks. Then I work may fingers across the keyboard until the colleagues from Team Ocean pick me up for lunch, usually at 12:00. Sometimes I join Birgit for lunch when she’s picking up a salad. (In the meantime I learned to order my salad ingredients in German.)
When we return from lunch, I connect my Spotify and continue coding until the evening.
Which technologies do you use?
I mainly work with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Jekyll as well as GitHub and Git. But I also need JavaScript for one or the other task. For testing I use Rspec and Minitest.
What do you like at ePages?
I like the flexible working hours. You can choose the computer you want (I chose the MAC book, of course 😉.) The colleagues are amazing. And ePages does great company events. We had a great YOU and a very funny New Year’s Kick-off. We do internal hackathons. And there was an R&D day, where all developers from all locations came together for knowledge exchange.
What qualities does an applicant need to fit into the team?
Elegantly-written code is very important. This means code has to be easy to read, very structured and understandable to other people. They should be curious and motivated to learn new stuff. He (or she!) should be a team-player, communicative, motivated and show interest.
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About the authors
