First impressions: Philipp Kaiser

Published 2014-07-18 by Jochen Lillich

Philipp started in May as the first employee of freistil IT Ltd. He is a long-time system administrator with a lot of experience in operating web-scale infrastructure.

Since May, Philipp has been going through Operations Bootcamp, a training series where new sysadmins learn everything they need about our tools, processes and especially all the software we run on our servers. He also started taking care of day-to-day tasks like support requests or the replacement of old infrastructure.

Here’s what Philipp makes of his first weeks at freistil IT:

Life before freistil IT

“My job before freistil was nine years of corporate work that I don’t want to have missed, but I’m really happy that it’s over now. I’ve learned a lot in different teams and environments over the time, and I had the chance to learn from some of the best developers and IT system cracks I’ve met so far. But being a small wheel in a large machine can be very frustrating, and from some point on, there’s only little chance to level up.”

What made freistil IT stand out?

“Let’s say “nine years are enough”! :) I felt the need for something new, and it should be something smaller, more flexible, and should not have anything to do with operating JBoss application servers. ;) Being given the opportunity to work remotely is a completely new experience to me. I wanted to try this way of working and the job offer from freistil was the only one I got featuring this. And last but not least, I knew Jochen before, so I knew the start would be a bit easier than in a completely new working environment.”

What are your first impressions of the team and culture?

“The team (and here, I refer more to Jochen and Markus than to myself) is highly skilled and quite enthusiastic. My learning curve is not a curve at all, it’s more like a vertical line, which can be strenuous sometimes, but at the end of the day is exactly what I was looking for. The culture is new, fresh, and free. Fantastic when you’re coming from a musty corporate environment.”

What do want to achieve with the operations team?

“Keep it up and running, but also pull it to the latest trends and never let the needs of our customers out of sight. And I’m looking forward to get more involved in the Open Source community, which is much easier here at freistil IT, I think.”

Thanks, Philipp! We’re happy to have you on our team and are looking forward to a great time!

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