When did you start working at Echometer?
Felix: I already worked at Echometer as a freelancer in 2019, but only started working full time in summer 2020.
What is your previous work experience?
Felix: I finished a dual course of studies in Business Informatics at Bertelsmann in Gütersloh. Afterwards I worked 2 years as a full time app developer in one of Bertelsmann's subsidiaries – until I joined Echometer.
At Echometer
What do you like about working at Echometer?
Felix: My favorite part about working at Echometer is definitely our culture. Everyone can freely talk about their challenges and fuckups without being judged. Instead, others will provide useful & motivating feedback that helps you grow as an individual 💪
If you could write your own job title that best describes what you do at Echometer, what would it be?
Felix: I would probably choose something along the lines of "full stack & UI / UX developer". My primary focus is the developer role, in which I work each and every part of our infrastructure.
Your favorite retrospective method or team workshop?
Felix: I love the keep, stop, start retro method. It is very basic and down to earth and still creates decent results every time!
You want to learn more about the "keep, stop, start" retro method? Click here to read our blog article.
What is your personal highlight that you achieved or experienced while working at Echometer?
Felix: I think validating a huge mockup for a complete redesign of our retro flow that we are currently working on was an amazing experience. We got a lot of great feedback & opinions on that and it showed us that we work on the right challenges.
What was your first week at Echometer like?
Felix: My first week was full of the realization that I am now way more responsible for the outcome of my work than before.
What was your biggest or funniest fuckup at Echometer?
Felix: We received a customer complaint, about emails not finding their way into their destination inbox. A quick glimpse into the logs told me that some errors happened. This resulted in the affected users being blacklisted and not receive any further emails by our email service.
The first thing I did was to remove the users from our blacklist with the goal to have a look into the problems root cause afterwards. Little did I know – our email logs were only saved for 6 days and the first occurrence of the problem was> 6 days ago. So when I removed the entries from our blacklist, there was no way to have a further look into the issue and all the evidence of whatever happened was gone.
What is an interesting thing you learned at Echometer?
Felix: Well I did learn quite a lot at Echometer, but one of the biggest changes in the way I work is GraphQL. It is a query language for your api and completely changes the way your frontend (& you as a dev) interact with your backend!
Personal
How would your friends describe you in 3 words?
Felix: Logical, funny, relaxed
What are the values that drive you?
Felix: Working takes up a huge chunk of time in our life – so we should try to make the best of it ourselves and also support others in doing so!
What are your hobbies?
Felix: My favorite pandemic hobby currently is gaming with my friends – its the main way my social circle stays in contact during these trying times. However, as soon as the weather allows for it, I will be out on the streets inline-skating my way through Münster.
Beside all of that, I am really attracted by challenging myself with hobbies like pen spinning or Rubik's Cube solving. You can really invest some time in these hobbies just to "git gud".
I also really look forward to visit a gym again after the pandemic slows down.
A picture of you as a kid?
Felix: This is me minus the beard.