[POC] Loving a challenge

A passion for technology and an insatiable hunger for challenges led Jakob to Cloudflight more than 10 years ago. Since then, he has done everything from engineering unique technical solutions to managing social media channels.

Making friends by hacking their projects

Since Jakob was a child, he has loved technology. As a two-year-old, he assembled and disassembled toys. Later he started to play computer games, programmed Lego Mindstorms robots, and coded his own browser game in PHP. When he was 12, he began to discover the beauty of reverse engineering, which was especially useful for creating hacks for games, and, even though he had no idea, this hobby would eventually bring him to Cloudflight.

In high school, when a schoolmate boasted about a browser game he developed, Jakob naturally hacked it because, why not, and recommended he fix it. After some fierce exchanges, the two boys bonded and became friends. A few years later, they heard about a coding contest and decided to participate together. They did quite well, and Jakob even discovered some security issues with the coding contest platform. The organizers were so impressed that they decided to offer both of them an internship. The contest was the Cloudflight Coding Contest (CCC) 2012.

There is always a challenge at Cloudflight

Despite first joining as an intern in software engineering, over the years, Jakob has gone through almost all the teams in the company, including engineering, testing, DevOps, and security. The list goes on. He even helped the marketing team when he ran the CCC social media channels. He was actually only posting cringy memes, but, truth be told, somehow it just worked. Now Jakob has two main roles: managing the internal IT and leading a team of site reliability engineers, who keep our software solutions running flawlessly. Nevertheless, everybody knows him as “Mr. Fix-It.” No matter what the problem might be, Jakob can solve it. And he always does.

Since his first day at Cloudflight, Jakob has never been bored, and there’s always a challenge to solve. He makes sure that all our colleagues have the right tools for their jobs, the security is top notch, and he also helps customers enjoy truly unique solutions with specific infrastructures and with a lot of custom microservices. Besides the challenge, he loves the flexibility of planning his own schedule, and, especially in the winter, he can finish early and go ski-touring. It would be hard to imagine Cloudflight without him. Jakob, thanks for being here for all of us!

“Good people like to work with good people.”

From the interview with Jakob