My Week showcases one of our expert’s work week – the highs and the challenges they are facing, and what the role actually consists of.

Jakub is an experienced Senior Azure Architect and DevOps Engineer, happily working both in large-scale architectural views as well as hands-on in developing pipelines. He is working in Zure Denmark -our latest country that was founded just this year. Let’s learn more about Jakub and his work life!

What does your work as Senior Azure Architect consist of?

My core skills have been in the meeting point of Azure and DevOps. Last years I have been doing designing and architectural planning on Azure, but lately working with DevOps setup, like maintaining IaC and CI/CD pipelines. I know this sounds funny, but when I started working with IaC, it was love at first sight. It is just such a great move for the industry. It just makes sense that everyone can be involved in infrastructure.

I am working side by side with Kenneth, nowadays we are meeting live at our Danish office for the most part of the week. For example, last weeks we have been planning on different cases how customers adopt Azure here in Denmark. It has been super interesting, as there you need to consider all aspects from strategy to architecture and even detailed technical questions.

At Zure, we have such many different meetups and groups where we share internally new learnings and best practices. We have a DevOps meetup every Friday, and also our DevOps Guild produces all the company guidelines and templates for us to work onwards. Yesterday our two DevOps Engineers showcased their learnings on one of our cutting-edge projects. On the other way round, I am helping my Finnish colleagues with our internal tooling and a new API & bot for registering work hours. We have here quite many ways to develop ourselves, but the best thing is the super competent colleagues working side by side.

What are the core competencies of an Azure Architect / DevOps Engineer?

Curiosity. Always being eager to learn new, try out, not being afraid of failing. DevOps work is usually a puzzle where you cannot know if you have all the pieces in hands. So you need to have the curiosity to find out the new areas and missing pieces. Also, coding skills are quite relevant – but that is a skill that can be learned. The mindset of learning and curiosity is something that I look for in people working with me.

What is the best and worst of DevOps career choice?

The absolute best of working in this field with DevOps and Azure architecture is that I can work with really skillful people from different domains. I can be challenged every day and learn new ways. Also I really like the combination of hands-on doing with high-level architectural design. I can have a real impact in both levels.

The worst times are when I have had the feeling that I am just firefighting instead of trying to actually make the processes better. If the design decisions are not applicable but I have no means to change it, just repair the damages when they occur. Luckily I have not been in those situations lately, but sometimes we just cannot optimize everything at once.

What accomplishment do you remember still from your career?

My IT-story started already a while ago in a Consultant Trainee position. I was instantly drawn into development side of the project, and soon into developing a project all by myself. Slightly terrified I ended up putting the product into production. It was justified, as the next six months I spent fixing bugs. However, in meantime I really learned all the flaws I had made, and ended up taking an architectural decisions all by myself to rewrite a big part of the product. I’m quite proud of it, as it is still used today, about 17 years after I published it again.

Fun fact: what would you do if you did not work in IT?

I would be working as a carpenter. I have renovated two houses so far, and I have to say I love the part when I can do really hands-on stuff – with my actual hands 😀