Hi, I’m Jessica and recently joined VSHN as a Scrum Master and Team Facilitator at Team Polaris.

I grew up in a small Village near Murten. I have moved further and further away from there since then: first I went to Fribourg for my Bachelor in psychology (no worries, fortunately I can’t read thoughts ), followed by Bern for my Master in work- and organizational psychology.

Furthermore, I also had my first employment as an organizational developer at the cantonal informatics department in Bern. As an organizational developer, I was responsible for facilitating management and employees events as well as accompanying the organization through different change phases – for example, establishing agile working structures and methods. After a year in, I got to be part of an agile project where I first took the role as a scrum master and later product owner of a team with the focus on user adoption for Microsoft 365 Apps. 

To clean my head after a workday, I design my spare time in diverse ways – there is room for everything from reading books, to traveling with my self-made camper van, to doing sports.

Now I’m in Zurich and very excited to be a part of VSHN, making new experiences and develop myself further. 

Hello everyone! My name is Nick Marti, and I just joined VSHN.

As someone who is just getting started in my professional DevOps journey, I’m thrilled to introduce myself and share a little bit about me and my passions.

I grew up among five siblings at the last stop of Kt. Glarus. I spent half of my childhood in the mountains either on foot, on a bike or on skis/snowboard. The other half was spent building dams, raising frogs and butterflies, as well as exploring mountain streams and ponds for newts and salamanders.

When I wasn’t out exploring, I fell in love with books! What started out with children’s and fantasy books quickly evolved to whatever I could get my hands on. Whether it’s a captivating novel or a helpful technical manual, I find joy in exploring the world of literature. From Donald E. Knuth to Akira Toriyama, I’m always eager to learn new things, and reading has been a great way for me to expand my knowledge and grow as a person.

When it comes to my professional life, during my studies I put the main focus of my elective classes on the world of Cloud Computing, DevOps, and Cloud Native applications. This cumulated in my Bachelor’s Thesis, where I took a deep dive into the optimization of resource allocation in containers on Kubernetes. This further fueled my interest and passion for this field. I’m fascinated by the potential of technology to automate and streamline processes, and I’m eager to learn as much as I can about this exciting field.

While I’m still in the early stages of my career, I’m excited to see where this path takes me. I’m eager to learn from my colleagues and mentor, and to contribute my own unique perspective to the team.

I’m excited to be a part of VSHN as well as Nunki and can’t wait to see what the future holds.

Hi! I’m Pierre, I’m now part of the Polaris team, as a DevOps engineer. I grew up in France near Grenoble, but my family roots are in Switzerland, and decided to come back to them in 2020.

My background is with Privacy, Infosec and Forensics, but as I found that decent Ops are one of the best tools to improve security, I got sidetracked a bit, and here I am now. I am mostly experienced with Ansible, and most of my previous jobs involved heavy automation of existing infrastructure to reduce incident response time, and sometimes make life easier. I also spent a lot of time maintaining unavoidable legacy, automating and improving reliability as possible. I have been in contact with pretty much all of the important solutions, but I’m looking forward to delve much deeper in some of them, especially K8s.

My hobbies are quite diverse, but here’s a few. As a techie, of course tinkering with a lot of things, but also hiking, skiing, paragliding, everything related to being somewhere in the mountains, usually accompanied by our dog that would prefer to be sleeping somewhere warm. I also spend a lot of time shooting, I used to compete in IPSC, but I’m somewhat out of it lately. I enjoy cooking a lot, and tend to monopolize the kitchen wherever I go.

Hey, I’m Aline. I joined the Aldebaran team (after much deliberation – sorry Vega folks 😉 ) as a DevOps engineer.

I’m a software engineer gone ops, having discovered my interest during my previous employment. After spending some time setting up and maintaining a bespoke Kubernetes environment for a microservices-driven product, I’m now hoping to diversify my knowledge (and find out just how good OpenShift actually is). I’m looking forward to new challenges at VSHN.

My favourite hobby is trying new things, especially if these things allow me to be creative. Most recently I’ve taken up the Ukulele and gotten into sewing. I also play games, both offline and online, but always with friends. Many experiences are so much better when shared!

In that light, I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone at VSHN. Let’s chat sometime, and let me know if you ever want to see copious amounts of cat pictures. 😉

Hi, my name is Liene. Feel free to pronounce it as is easier for you. I respond to almost any version.

I am born and raised in Latvia (that is the middle one of the Baltic countries). Later on I found my way to Liechtenstein, where I completed a masters degree, learned skiing and became an outdoors person. I might be one of the rare people who listens to science podcasts during a run or a workout. Always hungry for knowledge and, well, just hungry.

For about 5 years I have been working as a product owner and project manager in a medical software company. I am excited to change the environment and technology by joining VSHN as a product owner. Together we will reach new heights.

I’m Mia, and I just joined the Atria team as an Account Manager.

The last four years I’ve been dedicated to my own digital marketing/web design business, and before that, I was working as a key account / customer success / customer service manager at different software development companies. Making customers happy is my jam!

I’m 3/4 “Bärnermeitschi” born and raised in our beautiful capital, with 1/4 Hamburger blood, but I lived in many different places over the years, from Siena, to Berlin, to London. 

In my free time I love to walk for hours… whatever this is in the woods near my flat in Kloten, over the golf course, or when exploring new places (I love to travel, and my favorite destination is Hawaii). When I’m not walking around, you’ll probably find me cruising with our 62′ Chrysler Newport.

I’m super excited to now be a part of VSHN & looking forward to my first customer meetings.

Hi there!

My name is Sabrina, and I joined team Antares in People Operation and Finance Administration.

In my previous job, I was a supervisor of administration over two business locations. Through this position, I was able to gain a lot of experience in various activities in the administration and the HR area. I am very excited to extend and deepen my knowledge in many areas at VSHN now.

My husband and I run a small organic farm on the side. So, I spend most of my free time on our farm or with our animals. Since the job and our farm keep me on my toes, I like to spend the rest of my free time with family and friends or participate in our village life.

I am looking forward to meeting you all in person and working alongside you.

Sabrina

Hi! I am Alex, I have just moved to Switzerland from Mainz, Germany and joined VSHN as a DevOps Engineer.

I have worked as a Linux Server Admin and System Engineer in my previous positions in Germany, and now look forward to work with the modern technical environment that VSHN has to offer. I have a lot of fun tinkering with open source software and electronics since my childhood days, and I am always happy to learn about new technology to make our everyday life easier. Back in Mainz I established a hack lab with a friend and loved to spend time there soldering and learning about hardware, and hope to be able to continue this in Switzerland!

Besides my computer life I love working out at the gym, and I love skateboarding and snowboarding. My passion for riding down mountain roads on my skateboard has brought me to many places around the world, but Switzerland remains one of the best places on Earth to follow that passion, so I am more than happy to finally have made the step and moved here.

On October 21 and 22 2021, the second VSHN internal HackDay took place. Like the first edition, it was a hugely successful event.

The VSHN HackDay is open to all VSHNeers who are interested to break out of the daily business and work on cool and fun stuff.

We again decided that topics should be split into work groups consisting of 1-2 people. The topics were collected beforehand in our forum and VSHNeers could either join a topic or bring in their own ideas.

We agreed on having this HackDay again via Mibo which was also a lot of fun.

Impression from VSHN HackDay #2

HackDay topics

We had an awesome choice of interesting topics ranging from “A better way to deal with limits of vendor-provided cluster monitoring”, “Automatically document Commodore hierarchy content”, APPUiO.cloud self-sign-up prototype, Automate Odoo overtime and more.

The winner

The winner of HackDay #2 was “Engineering disk encryption management at large scale”.

Congrats to Simon and David for getting the most votes and winning the prize of CHF 500.00 to spend in Swibeco and of course glory and honor 🎉.

The feedback was also very positive and we are all already looking forward to our next VSHN HackDay!

Hey there! I am Dawn, the new Recruitment & Employee Experience Specialist. I’m very excited to become a VSHNeer and join the Team Antares.

I have 7 years’ experience within Recruitment and HR, both on a local and international spectrum. I will use my skills and grow more with you all here at VSHN, assisting you to build and grow the already strong teams.

My career started within the UK (I’m from Birmingham, so a real “Brummie” and I can sound like I am a Peaky Blinder when on the phone to friends – just the accent ;-)). I worked nationally to gaining a strong knowledge of people and communication skills. When I came to Switzerland in 2013, I made the decision to move into the recruitment profession, where I have the upmost passion to achieve and strive for the best every day.

I have a little Girl and Boy who keep me very entertained in my spare time. We love being outdoors as much as possible, whatever this entails – every day is an adventure. For the little time I have for myself, I love socialising, reading books, walking and doing sports.

I’m really excited to getting to know you all and working alongside you.

Dawn

Last September eight members of VSHN’s Team Pollux took the opportunity to organize a yearly team building event, and we’d like to brag about it a little. The choice of destination fell on Moirans-en-Montagne, a charming town in France, not far from the Swiss border.

Friday on the road

The trip there took us through beautiful green wooded hills. Even though another Team (thank you, Team Sirius!) took over our Operation tasks this day, some people couldn’t resist to check on our services.

Once arrived we were greeted by the caretaker, who gave us a tour of our weekend villa; a lucky find on Airbnb. It turned out to be unexpectedly maze-like, but in the end we didn’t spend too much time inside anyway. The swimming pool and pool house (complete with a fireplace!) as well as the nearby Via Ferrata would be the focus of our attention for the next two days.

But first we had to take care of our grumbling tummies. A shopping task force automatically assembled itself and headed for the local supermarket. Last-minute shopping additions were remotely added via group chat, the whole thing felt very effortless. The same was true for the evening’s BBQ preparations: one person went to find an axe to chop wood with, someone prepared a salad, others scoured the house for the least mismatched cutlery and plates. One delicious BBQ later we dipped into the pool as the night illumination came on and the full moon rose above us.

There was never a big central master plan for any of this, yet it all worked out swimmingly (hah).

A sunny Saturday

After Saturday’s brunch (French croissants are delicious!) exactly half the team split off for a climbing adventure above Lac de Vouglans.  Nobody ended up causing a rescue operation Instead the group enjoyed a spectacular view and thanks to excellent timing didn’t get (too) scorched by the sun.

The groups joined back up again at the pool, in time for late afternoon poolside drinks (and Swiss-German lessons). We were extremely lucky with the weather as the original forecast predicted a rainy Saturday. Instead we enjoyed swimming all evening in summer’s last rays of sunshine, and then prepared another extensive BBQ in the pool house.

Just like the day before, the team coordinated without many words: some cut vegetables, others chopped wood and prepared the fire, or washed dishes and set the table. It was remarkable how the agile mindset seems to have seeped into our brains so much that it’s applied automatically even to everyday chores.

Once the party heated up a little, and everyone had had their singing juice, we sang 90s songs deep into the night, played card games, and of course made use of the pool again for some night swimming.

It seems like none of us had the urge to talk about, or even touch technology very much during these days. The villa offered two TVs and we had multiple Nintendo Switches on hand but they all remained switched (haha) off. Instead we had card games, singing, swimming, and long discussions.

A lazy Sunday

Sunday meant we had to depart. At least the weather had turned drizzly and gray so it would be easier to say goodbye to our villa. Cleaning up was just as smooth and easy as everything else this weekend. Everyone swarmed and barely an hour later we were ready to go. We made a last valiant attempt to get rid of the leftover ice cream (by getting it into our stomachs) and drove off.

We’d like to thank VSHN for making this weekend possible. All of us feel that it brought the team closer together. We can’t wait to see what teambuilding activities the other VSHN teams come up with!

What we learned about organizing our own team building event:

• You don’t actually need to plan that much if you’re used to agile thinking. Picking a good location was the hardest part.
• Coaching and focused exercises are fine team building instruments. But it seems like organizing something, such as cooking, eating, singing and doing sports together, also makes for fine team glue.