A Day in the Life of DevOps Engineer Michiel Van Herreweghe & Cloud Native Developer Ward Lostrie!

Hey, we are Ward and Michiel, and we both started working at CloudFuel recently. Curious about how we are experiencing life at CloudFuel so far? 

We each have our own function here. Ward mainly focuses on application health, or reliability, as it’s often called today. That involves improving the observability of applications for clients, monitoring, implementing necessary adjustments, and setting up dashboards where clients can visually track changes. Michiel, on the other hand, is focused on automating the deployment of infrastructures in the cloud for applications. It’s important to ensure this can be done securely and with as minimal manpower as possible. This is our second work experience, and both of us were looking for a role with more cloud-related responsibilities. We definitely found that here at CloudFuel! 

Our days are incredibly varied. They range from meeting with clients to diving into code to see how and why something (isn’t) working, organising workshops, and setting up and evaluating systems. We usually offer clients fairly standard packages, concerning alerts, for example. Each project needs to be fine-tuned, though, so every project runs a bit differently. The great thing here is that we usually work on two projects at once and still have one day a week left for internal R&D—this includes things like following training courses and obtaining certifications. This way, we’re challenged every day, and that’s something we both love about the job. 

Michiel enjoys solving complex problems, especially when the client is genuinely happy with the result. When you pay them a visit again after a while and see that they’re still doing well with the solution you delivered, that’s a particularly rewarding feeling. For Ward, it’s the same; it’s great to dive deep into a problem, but it’s even more satisfying when you finally see the puzzle laid out in front of you, knowing exactly how you’re going to fix things. And the projects are just fun and varied, working with Kubernetes, .NET, and so on. 

For us, CloudFuel’s way of working is quite a breath of fresh air compared to what we tend to see at other firms, in the sense that consultancy here doesn’t mean full-time secondment. Both of us were looking for a place where we wouldn’t be treated as a number but could foster real relationships with our colleagues. We feel like that actually happens here: we all come into the office about two days a week, CloudFuel regularly organises teambuilding events (or Arxus does, our parent company), and we have multiple stand-ups each week to share what we’re working on. It’s great to see that when you indicate that you’re stuck on something, there are always people who immediately offer to help. The collegiality here is fantastic! 

Aside from that, we were pleasantly surprised to find that there’s no hierarchy here at all. Everyone is approachable and treated as equals. Whether you’re a ‘junior’ or ‘senior’ doesn’t matter—your ideas are welcome and encouraged. The same goes for opportunities. If you want to grow in a particular direction even if you don’t have much experience yet in that specific field of expertise, you’re certainly not being held back, quite the opposite even. CloudFuel thinks along with us and provides guidance for the growth we want to achieve. 

Additionally, we can count on allocated time that is meant for studying for certifications. Which ones? That’s completely up to us! Michiel also blogs about topics for CloudFuel that he finds interesting. He’s all about GitOps as of late, since that’s starting to gain traction in Belgium. Therefore, it’s the perfect opportunity for CloudFuel to create leading content on the subject, right? Ward, on the other hand, has been creating internal documentation on his experiences with Grafana, so colleagues can quickly get started with it if they’d like. Thanks to all of those aspects, we truly feel that we can steer our own course at CloudFuel and are fully supported in doing so. 

In case it’s not abundantly clear by now: we’re still very glad to have ended up working here! However, do you need more convincing because you’re still unsure yourself? Reach out to us (or Marnik, or Vincent, or…) and we’ll gladly supply even more reasons why we hope to remain at CloudFuel for a long time! 

Are you completely convinced that you want to join our enthusiastic crew too? New colleagues are always welcome, so be sure to contact us!