I have been working in the tech industry for almost seven years. Coming from a traditional education in Information Technology and Software Development, I've spent the last years doing the same kind of tasks as a Backend Software Engineer, mainly in the startup world. For people who know me, it can be surprising to learn that I did the same job for years. I'm a jack of all trades, hopping between technical subjects like a bunny in a rabbit hole.

However, I made a sideway career move recently. I stopped whatever product-oriented software development I was doing with my team at JobTeaser and started working with our internal tools & productivity team called "DevEx." I've spent more than a year with the Desktop User Experience team, which was a lovely experience. I worked on user-facing products used by more than a million European students, and I'm grateful for that.

So, "why move then?" For several reasons:

• I wanted to "change something" for a while. As I said, I'm a jack of all trades. Starting from my uni period, I wanted to be an IoT Developer, then a Video Game Tool Programmer, then a System Software Engineer before ending up in the web development world without really understanding how and why. Being a backend software engineer doing mostly CRUD APIs for almost seven years sounds weird, given my personality.
• I wanted to challenge myself. There's a lot of exciting stuff hiding at the frontier of the backend and infrastructure worlds. I want to dive deep into those subjects and understand them.
• I love automation. That's a weird one, but building an Ansible playbook to automate the setup of a VM or programming a script to avoid menial tasks gives me as much joy than making a user-facing web product. Everyone should focus on what brings them joy. This move follows this philosophy.
• Our DevEx team at JobTeaser was looking for some help, especially with a combination of backend and product knowledge. I took the occasion to make an internal application which was accepted. When planets are aligned, it's time to follow the path without asking too many questions.

It's been two weeks since I joined the DevEx team, leaving the DUX team behind. The demanding schedule made me leave them before a critical deadline following the Post-Merge Integration of Graduateland by JobTeaser. Still, they're perfectly able to handle the next steps of this project to completion. Knowing that the team wasn't subject to the bus factor with my departure is reliving.

So, two weeks in. How's the experience?

Well, the team I have joined is five people today: two backends, one frontend, and two DevOps. Our scope expands from the various build tools, the CI system, and the homemade API gateway. It also includes a lot of (not so) small tooling-related stuff. If something is hurting the developer experience somewhere at JobTeaser, it's our job to fix it. We also have the role of the "software gardener" by upgrading and cleaning our tools and processes.

My first day with my new team focused on setting our goals for this quarter. We follow the OKR methodology, even for tooling. Each quarter we choose a set of objectives to which we commit to other software developers at the company.

So, for the next two/three months, I will primarily focus on the following:

• Ease our monolith installation process (using Docker).
• Provide a better micro-services development experience in a local environment.
• Study the possibility of replacing our homemade API gateway with a standard tool (such as Kong).
• Speed up the execution of the monolith test suite on the developer's laptop.

Two weeks in, and it's pretty good. 🙂

I'm happy about this move and will not have time to be bored. Moving internally and changing positions without leaving your company is a blessing.