Baris Leenders

Hi Baris, thanks for taking the time for this interview. Your background is in web development and design as well as programming. In June 2019 you joined the marketing tribe as member no. 3, for whom you moved to Munich.

How did it happen that you are now part of our marketing-tribe as our Web developer??

After working in a Dutch web development agency for 10 years I felt it was time for a new challenge. So I started looking for companies in Germany in cities that spoke to me and had a product I liked.

I was doing a trip through Germany to visit 6 companies in 3 cities. I messaged Martin that I was going to be in Munich to interview at 3 other companies and he invited me to drop by the Checkmk offices. Back then the marketing tribe only consisted out of 2 people, Martin and Cristian. Martin told me the company was looking to either hire an agency or an in-house developer to create a new website. I shared some advice, we looked at the website and afterwards had lunch together. We never had a real interview, but it felt like a pleasant place to work at. Shortly after I left, Martin offered me a place at Checkmk.

When I came back home in the Netherlands I had to make a decision and in the end I had the best feeling at Checkmk.

The company still had a start-up vibe even though the product and the company were almost 10 years old. And I saw a lot of growth potential because the company was only just starting to create a marketing department.

What does that exactly mean? What are your tasks?

I am mainly responsible for the development and CI/CD of the website, Checkmk exchange, customer portal, download server and Checkmk documentation. I also make sure these applications are communicating with third party applications such as our CRM, Jira, lead generation platform etc.

I help to take care of the web servers that are hosting these applications as well as the servers which run our forum, translation platform and log monitoring.

And right now I am helping Thomas with hammering out some of the technical aspects of the migration to our new CRM system.

What made you to move to Checkmk?

From the start I had a good feeling about the company and the people in my team. Everyone is very down to earth and pleasant to work with. I like the fact that the open source version is still actively maintained and improved. It also helped that Munich is a very nice place to live.

What are the most valuable points for you working in our marketing tribe?

Nice teammates, the freedom to learn new tools and technologies and owning your work.

Even though we are all working remote most of the time, we have a good and pleasant vibe in the team. We do our daily stand-ups, we have a weekly lunch together, do a workout session from time to time, we try to squeeze in a virtual team event when possible.

You always have the freedom to dive in to new tools and technologies which could be beneficial to the team and the company.

Last but not least, I am responsible for my own work. They place trust in my experience as a web developer. And since I am the only web developer here I got the freedom to decide how I build the applications that we need. I can choose the programming language, frameworks, CI and server side applications myself.

The marketing tribe has an agile work environment. How does a typical sprint look like?

We currently do 2 week sprints. Everyone in the company can create tickets for other people when they need something done. We use every second Tuesday afternoon to prepare the next sprint together. During sprint planning we go over all the tickets and decide what has priority. After the sprint planning we have a retrospective with the team to see what went well and what we could improve during the next sprint.

During the following 2 weeks you are free to work on the tickets in whatever order you desire.

For me personally, that typically means I start between 9 and 9:30 am and stop working around 6 pm. But you are free to decide when you start and stop working, as long as you attend the dailies and other meetings.