Polar Squad is the right place for me to drive change
This is the 2nd part of the blog series “We are Polar Squad” where we introduce some people from our awesome company. Next up is Ville. Let’s hear what he says!
Tell us a bit about yourself and your background?
Hi! I’m Ville and joined Polar Squad a few months back! My journey to the land of the cloud and DevOps began nine years ago with my master’s thesis on Amazon Web Services. I continued my research as a postgraduate student for a couple of years, up until I admitted academic writing wasn’t my strong suit. From there I moved to Gofore, where I started my software consultancy career and enjoyed working there for six years. Before all this, I’ve had a multitude of shorter jobs, ranging from software testing to embedded programming.
What was the path that led you into becoming a DevOps consultant for Polar Squad?
I had been doing cloud consultancy in a small unit inside a larger organization and felt that consulting itself was close to my heart, but longed for a tighter community with complete freedom to steer the company.
Since moving to Helsinki a year and a half ago, I had been dodging headhunters non-stop. At first, the attention felt nice, but after a while, it became a kind of tedious. One headhunter was particularly persistent, though in a positive way. “Ville, don’t be so narrow-minded!”, he insisted. I eventually agreed to visit Polar Squad, but turned the offer down, as I had other promising things going on at the time. A year later, once I had given it a solid thought, the time was right to finally join the squad!
What tools do you like to use in your work?
In the cloud, I prefer immutable and non-persistent infrastructure, ideally containers or serverless. That way it usually sorts itself out when problems occur, and does not require a gray-bearded wizard to come to fix it. Right now, I’ve been working with ECS Fargate and Lambda.
Infrastructure as code is a no-brainer. Traditionally CloudFormation has gotten the job done, but AWS CDK completes the paradigm. Python’s been my favorite language, as it’s really quick to do small infrastructure scripts and tools with it, but it can be used to write larger pieces of software, and it’s always available. Lately, I’ve been looking into TypeScript as well.
As for my laptop, I chose to go with Dell XPS 13 as it’s portable. I run Ubuntu on it as it gets shit done. After all, a laptop is mostly a thing to run a browser and an IDE (VS Code in this case) on.
What sets Polar Squad apart from other companies you worked at?
Many companies emphasize employee happiness in their marketing. At Polar Squad, however, I feel like we truly focus on the happiness of our people over company growth for example. I can also affect anything, and people strive to improve the way we work. We push our customers to a whole new level, and ultimately try to make ourselves unnecessary.
How would you describe the culture in PS? How can you maintain a company-wide culture when most employees work in different clients? Would you like to give us detailed examples of what the culture is about in Polar Squad?
The culture here is warm, and you get that family-like fuzzy feeling. To get familiarized, we have lots of activities, whether it’s during the workday or after. People take bike trips together, go play frisbee golf, participate in a Counter-Strike tournament for companies, or sit down to think about what kind of office we want. Slack is a useful tool, but we come together at least once a week when we have breakfast at our head office.
Oh, and on coffee breaks, we often play TowerFall Ascension, aka “Jouskarihippa”. I’m getting pretty okay at it, I even won once!
Tell us about your day to day routines?
I’m currently at a large customer helping hundreds of software teams adopt DevOps practices. The days are diverse and include coaching, pair programming, designing cloud architectures, implementing CI/CD pipelines and recruiting new team members.
Usually, I’m at the customer if I’m with a team that’s in Helsinki. Otherwise, I’m mostly at the Polar Squad office, occasionally traveling to meet the teams in other cities. Lately, I’ve been also working from home.
What kind of technical challenges do you meet at your work?
The most important challenges right now are non-technical and relate to organizational transformation, team practices, and communication.
The technical challenges relate to aligning the teams: how to build infrastructure tooling for a diverse set of teams, in an agile way, while minimizing the number of breaking changes.
At this scale, it does not make sense for each autonomous team to build its infrastructure from scratch. We cannot force a unified way either, but to be able to provide support, we do need to limit the diversity a bit. As we discover new needs, we need to be able to implement features in a way that the teams can easily take them into use.
Before this project, I was part of an SRE team, where the most interesting challenges were complex issues in production environments. They are always a bit menacing, and you often have to alleviate the issue first, and then begin digging for the root cause. Some of my latest challenges have related to debugging timeouts in API calls with NAT traversal and multiple proxies.
How does it feel to work with developer teams? Do we have a common ground?
I always feel welcome and think I’m part of the team. Developers are happy that people taking care of the infrastructure are now part of the team and sit right next to them.
We should try not to make a distinction between Dev and Ops people. Teams will always have people with various skills and slightly different roles, and the team should have end-to-end responsibility of the product they are developing. Infrastructure is more and more defined as code (I mean code, not JSON), so Ops people also need to know how to code. At the same time, serverless paradigm brings infrastructure closer to the business logic.
In the future, these traditionally separate roles will meld together. And I think Polar Squad is the right place for me to drive that change.