While COVID-19 strikes industries worldwide, Bitergia continues to grow and provide competitive analytics solutions for Software Development at Scale and cross-community collaboration. The Bitergia family is pleased to welcome our new engineer team members: Eva Millán and Venu Vardhan. Keep reading to learn their story!
We first interviewed our Bitergia CTO, Santi Dueñas, who explains where Bitergia is today and why it is key to have Eva and Venu on board for the engineering team.
Where is Bitergia now and why is it key to have Eva and Venu on board?
For those who don’t know about Bitergia’s journey yet, GrimoireLab is an evolution of the work done during +10 years by Bitergia developers, as well as the core technology used to provide software development analytics services through Bitergia Analytics.
One of the main tasks in GrimoireLab during this year has been to improve the identity management system. SortingHat is the tool we use for it but it lacks a nice user interface, mainly because nobody in the community has enough UI/UX knowledge to lead that development. At Bitergia we consider identity management as a key part of our business, so we decided to open a position. Once we met Eva, we soon realized she had the skills and knowledge needed in our team to build the new interface for SortingHat. She’s doing great!
On the other hand, Valerio Cosentino, one of our best developers and the main contributor of GrimoireLab left Bitergia. We thought of Venu as a good candidate to take the lead: He is an active contributor to the CHAOSS project and has been contributing to GrimoireLab project for more than a year. Moreover, Venu did a great job in the last Google Summer of Code developing the Quality Models sub-component. We are very happy to have him on board.
Eva’s Journey
For this section, we interviewed Eva Millán, the new front-end developer at Bitergia. She tells us about how she switched from a non-tech to a technical field and become a front-end developer, as well as her expectations for the new SortingHat interface.
What experiences impacted your career?
When I was about 12, my parents got a dial-up connection that came with free internet hosting, and they encouraged me to make a website, so I made a completely embarrassing one about Britney Spears. I loved it and kept making personal websites for all my teenage years, but I didn’t think that could be a job and forgot about it and went to study English. A few years later I found out it was indeed an in-demand career, so I decided to change paths completely and study front end development.
Why did you want to join Bitergia?
After working mostly for fintech companies, I was looking for more meaningful, less evil work. I didn’t know much about Bitergia, but I saw they had a job opening and what I read about them sounded great to me:
– open source, focused on communities, and a work culture that promotes diversity and inclusion – Let’s give it a try!
I’m enjoying working in Bitergia so far, everyone is really friendly here! We’re building a new interface for SortingHat and I hope it can be a nice looking and useful tool for users to manage identities.
Venu’s Journey
For this section, we interviewed Venu, the new back-end developer at Bitergia. He tells us about how he got into open source during his college years and participated in Google Summer of Code, which gave him more confidence and experience.
What experiences impacted your career?
I was a member of amFOSS, it is an open-source student-run community in my University. I used to spend most of my after-college time in the lab participating in the club activities. Being an active member of the club has taught me many valuable skills and most importantly I enjoyed my time being over there.
I was a Google Summer of Code 2020 Student with the CHAOSS Community and I worked on the Quality Models project. It was a great experience and I learned a lot from the project. The open-source experience because of this program was definitely a plus point. I was much more confident to apply for opportunities after the completion of the project.
Why did you want to join Bitergia?
I heard about Bitergia almost a year ago, when I started contributing to the GrimoireLab project. During the year-long course, I worked with Bitergians seeking help regularly while contributing to GrimoireLab. I really enjoyed working with them. I was inspired by the work of the team in the field of Software Development Analytics.
After my undergraduate studies, I was looking for opportunities. I thought of applying for Bitergia and discussed the same with my GSoC project mentors, they encouraged me to apply for the open position. I was already familiar with the work and the team, so I decided to give it a try.
We are working on developing a new set of tools to generate GrimoireLab releases. The work is definitely exciting.
First impressions & future actions
Eva and Venu have started working at Bitergia this last quarter and already brought some ideas to the team. You will hear about the new SortingHat UI and Grimoirelab automation processes soon. Join our newsletter to be the first one to know!
