Max Linke

Hi Max, thanks for taking the time! You joined the company in 2022 as our first developer from Austria. Before that you worked with Big Data in a Consultancy and in Health Care. And you also own a Ph.D. in Physics.

What made you decide to join Checkmk? How did you come to Checkmk?

The hiring process was very smooth and fast and I enjoyed the interview and discussions I had during them.

WWhat are your tasks as a Staff Engineer and how does your typical work day look like?

I help make our Cloud offering a commercial success. This has started building the admin platform, and now extends to close the feature gap to our on-prem offering. On a typical day I start by reviewing my todos for the day. Depending on the day I will then either write code, clarify JIRA tickets, do some research for planned features, or coordinate with other teams that ship new features for our Cloud offering.

How do you handle code reviews and technical feedback?

When I do code reviews for others I generally try to do this within the same day. We try to work in small increments and also accept changes that are not 100% perfect, with a comment on what could be improved. As most colleagues follow through with improvement suggestions this keeps review focused on the essentials and not too disruptive.

What tools/technologies do you work with in your team?

In our company we mainly use python. For the saas platform we are using FastApi for our backend, NextJS for anything frontend. For the infrastructure we heavily use terraform and kubernetes.

What is most important to you in your work life?

I have two small kids, and my wife and I both work full time. So flexibility is pretty important for us to manage everything. I also like to learn new things. At Checkmk I can learn about new technologies constantly, when developing new checks for clients. But I’m also allowed to take time and study topics of personal interest, currently that is practicing test driven development.

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

When I started I used our RestAPI to help set up a local test environment for the GCP integration I was developing. During that I found a few bugs in our RestAPI. I spend a few days fixing all the bugs I found before continuing with my assigned tasks. To my surprise management was happy that I fixed all the bugs I found and encouraged that behavior.