Logan Connolly

You've been with Checkmk since August 2024. What must a software product and the company behind it offer for you to remain convinced of them even after several years?

For me it's transparency. I think Checkmk has a good track record of this. There is of course the external transparency, i.e. open source and active forum, but also internally we have frequent "All hands" meetings where the direction of the company is openly discussed.

What do you think makes Checkmk or your team in particular special?

I work in a product-facing team, so there is no shying away from feedback (prompted or unprompted). However, this aspect of the job excites me as I get to work on topics that are visible to our users. What's perhaps unique at Checkmk is that our users are more skilled and adept with the software than me. So, I'm always learning something new from them; it makes working on support tickets fun.

I also work alongside peers whose strengths and weaknesses are often quite different from mine. So, if I can't figure it out, I know someone else can pick up the slack. Like the Wu-Tang Clan, we "form like Voltron", but it doesn't matter who's at the head.

One of our developers highlighted our good work-life balance. What does a healthy balance mean to you, and how do you achieve it?

There is a lot of trust in our team. Everyone’s life is different, so they often have very different needs. We trust that the other will get their work done when they can. In the end, we are mainly focused on the outcome of the work and not how and when it's done.

Which development tools do you prefer using, and why are they essential for your daily work?

We have a lot of freedom regarding what tools we can use. My favorite setup is a 32" monitor with a terminal on one side and browser on the other.

Within the terminal I use tmux to run sessions for the different projects I'm working on. Within these sessions, I try to keep it simple. I use neovim for editing, bash for automating common workflows, as well as handy TUI programs like lazygit.

Can you describe the typical lifecycle when working on a new software feature within a team?

A feature usually stems from a request from our users. Our product team then organizes, prioritizes and groups requests in the form of an initiative.

The goal of an initiative is to bring together people from different disciplines to best solve a problem. This usually consists of a product owner who focuses on the end goal, a technical owner who makes sure that it's possible, a user experience (UX) expert to make it actually useful, and lastly the developers to write the software.

What do you value most when collaborating with other feature teams and developers?

Easily the breadth of knowledge and expertise at Checkmk. Everyone has a skill or two that they are truly experts in. What's more, they are always willing to share that expertise with me. Since I started, I've yet to meet someone not willing to take some time to help and share their knowledge.

Do you remember a particularly interesting, exciting or beautiful experience you had at Checkmk? If so, can you tell us about it?

When I first started I joined a book club where we met every Wednesday to discuss a chapter from a technical book. The books are of course great, but I appreciate the discussion even more. Usually, the members work in different teams, so I get some insight into what's going on around Checkmk.

The senior developer who created it thought that it was important that the book club lived on even if he couldn't organize. To fix this, he wrote a guide book, detailing how to run it.

Eventually, that situation arose and I took over the organization. Three books later, I've decided to pass on the torch to the next organizer who will then pass it on to the next. It's beautiful that the book club is bigger than any one person, and I hope it'll be around for many rounds to come.