Interview - Ferre Barrat

Who am I interviewing? Can you please introduce yourself?

First of all, thank you very much for the welcome. I am the 23-year-old new addition to Tailr. Together with Davy and Bert, I take care of the system administration and DevOps stuff. I would describe myself as an eager to learn person who likes challenges.

Before your job at Tailr, you were studying. Can you tell more about your education?

I studied system and network administration at Hogeschool PXL. Here I graduated as a graduate in June. During the first half of the program, we had a simulation internship in addition to our subjects. This gave us a taste of how things work in practice. I finished my academic chapter as a Security Engineer intern at Aviobook. Here I learned a lot about cloud infrastructure, automation, policies, security and how it all works at the background. I hope to use this knowledge here at PHPro as well.

What is your function and what are your tasks within Tailr?

I am a point of contact for all teams. If they need access to certain things, they can contact me for that. I am also responsible for automating repetitive tasks. One of the purposes of this is to make the work of the developers (and ourselves) more efficient.

How did you get to know Tailr?

Through a friend who has just started working here as a developer six months ago.

How do you like it so far? If I'm not mistaken, you started in September.

Indeed, I started on September 19th. So about a month ago. A very cool month I must say. Some days are more challenging than others, but it's mostly enriching. In short, I would describe Tailr as a very warm company with an eye for quality.

What does a typical day look like for you?

Mainly automation, I'm busy writing scripts and pipelines. Now and then colleagues ask questions. I then try to help them if possible. In addition, I regularly attend training courses. Furthermore, like almost every IT-related job, it is also a lot of documenting.

What do you like most about your job?

I especially like the automation. I like being hands-on with something. It requires some extra effort and thinking beforehand, but it saves you a lot of time. Making your colleagues' work go faster in this way is very satisfying.

You make other colleagues' lives easier. Shall I put it this way?

Yes, exactly!

What are currently your assignments within Tailr? Do you already have projects you can work on?

I'm not directly on projects on my own yet. It is mainly following along with Bert. Sometimes I do get to do upgrades on test environments already. I also help document and review our systems if new software vulnerabilities are found.

Who is your mentor? What is your mentoring like within the team?

My PHP mentor is Bert. I think the mentoring is fantastic. If I have questions, they are answered almost immediately. Both Bert and Davy are a tremendous source of knowledge. When I'm lost, they often know what the problem is immediately. It's clear that they love their job and are very enthusiastic.

What challenges/challenges have you encountered so far?

It's all new to me and sometimes it's a bit of a search, especially since I'm not familiar with all the projects yet.

What skills would you like to develop in the coming months?

Besides Lua, I wish to further develop my Linux and Ansible knowledge.

Anything else you want to say before we wrap up?

Tailr is an open and warm company that is very empathic towards their staff. This was already clear during my first interview. Furthermore, we also always keep our eyes open for new talent. So if you are looking for a new IT-related challenge or internship, I would definitely contact Tailr.

From this interview we can conclude that you are in the right place at Tailr. We wish you good luck with your further development!