Continuing with the series of interviews with programmers, today we bring you the interview with Ricard Clau. Ricard has been a developer in many companies in the tech sector (Wonga, Hailo, Social Point, Emagister, Ulabox, and Privalia, among others). Recently, he returned from London and will share his experience of working abroad and how his first weeks as the Technical Director (CTO) at HolaLuz have been.
Interview Breakdown
1:20 Promoting Computer Science
- I wasn’t very clear about what I wanted to do. I didn’t start programming at 10 years old or anything like that
- In my first programming exam, I scored a 0, but I found that programming entertained and interested me
- In banking, I wore a suit and tie, but it is still a sector with high scalability requirements
- Listen to yourself and fight for what you believe. If you are young, you still have time to change
- I went from telecommunications to programming because there was no work, and programming entertained me more. I discovered a vocation without knowing it
- Senior vs. Junior: If you can't train others, you may be very good, but there is a very important component of Seniority missing
8:37 Professional Journey
- The #Rigor concept arose from Rubén Garrido creating his personal website referencing rigor… and it was made in Flash 😬
- A good little bit of garbage on time is also rigor
- Ulabox was the project that launched me
- I ended up burned out at Social Point. It was also my fault. I put pressure on myself and didn’t know how to delegate
- Those were very stressful months. Dragon City (Social Point) went from 0 to 6 million users per day in 6-7 months
- I went to England thinking that things were done better there
- One thing that causes projects to go wrong in London is that there is a lot of money
- Carlos already said it, but at the beginning of your career, sacrificing 2-3 thousand euros to learn is a personal investment
- We give ourselves a reputation for being lazy, but then you go and see that there are Spaniards leading projects, and they regard us well
- I have moved a lot between companies. Either they ran out of money, or they promised you could do things and then that's not the case, or because I got a better offer
21:45 New Challenge as CTO
- I’m calm because I believe I have the experience to face it, but I am a bit apprehensive about being the director of something like this
- They tell me "let me explain the office network," and I still think "what are you telling me? 😅"
27:00 Ansistrano
- It’s an Ansible role for deploying and doing rollbacks
- It’s having success and the issues on GitHub are quite peculiar
- Companies should contribute more to Open Source (discount codes, development hours…)
31:40 Ideal System Stack Today
- Unless you are very large, nowadays it's hard for me not to choose Cloud
- AWS is light years ahead of Azure or Google Cloud
- In the AWS console, you click a button and no one remembers that. The day you have to take down the machine…
- Wonga Spain is set up on Terraform without touching the AWS console. From the creation of the VPC and the VPNs
- Ansible to provision the machines and Packer to generate the images
36:35 System Administration vs Development
- I was the developer who complained about not having root permissions, but then I gave root access to people I probably shouldn't have
- I’m in favor of everyone having permissions, but with caution
- There is indeed specialization, but the separation between systems and development doesn’t make sense
- I moved from development to systems because I liked the non-functional requirements more
38:50 How You Approach Recruiting in Barcelona
- We are going to conduct training. People will learn AWS, ELK, Ansible, Terraform, and I think that with that I will recruit people eager to learn
- I see it more dangerous if my entire team leaves in 1 year and I have to start the recruitment cycle again
- At HolaLuz, everything is to be done and it's interesting, but the market is complicated
- We often complain about technical tests, but when you're on the other side, many times it’s the only way you have to compare
We take this opportunity to mention that HolaLuz is looking for PHP developers.