Growing as a Software Engineer
By Luc Maas & Kemal Cagin Gulsen
Behind every successful technology company, there is a great team. That’s why at Blue Harvest we aim to grow our team; technically and emotionally. Kemal Gülsen has been working as a Software Engineer for a while now and I asked him how he believes he has grown so far.
Let’s jump right in. Kemal, why did you choose to work at Blue Harvest?
“After I completed my studies in Computer Science, I worked in Germany and Turkey for almost 3 years. I was ready for the next chapter in my life, so I chose to find a job in the Netherlands. Amsterdam was the perfect fit for me because it is one of Europe’s largest tech-hubs. It means that I could work on challenging projects and attend various technology events such as workshops, meetups, and conferences.”
“In order to get an opportunity in Amsterdam, a friend posted my resume on LinkedIn. Soon after that, the Blue Harvest recruiter, Matin Abbasi, saw the post and he reached out to me. Matin explained to me about Blue Harvest and we discussed if it would be a good match. The second interview was with the Managing Director, Tudor Uricec. I was impressed by this because most of the time you meet managers at the very last stages of the application process. For me, it was a sign that Blue Harvest really cared about recruiting talented engineers. We had a nice chat for an hour and spoke on various topics. Tudor was particularly interested in growth — both technically and emotionally. Afterward, of course, there were more technical steps that eventually resulted in an offer.”
Can you tell more about how Blue Harvest facilitates your growth process?
“We focus on intrapreneurship, which means that it’s important to behave like an entrepreneur while working within an organization. I am encouraged to develop my own idea into a workable product for the company. For e.g. I am working on a “Microservices with Kotlin and Spring Boot” project and I am automating social media reporting for the marketing team.”
“On top of that, we have many talented engineers at Blue Harvest and we are always challenging each other to improve ourselves. In order to achieve this, we follow the “agile mentorship” model which focuses on the technical and emotional growth of our engineers with a mentor-mentee relationship. Everybody has a mentor in Blue Harvest and this helps our personal growth in both ways. Your mentor is a senior engineer who is always there for you. I chat with my mentor Rodrigo Hammerly on Fridays. We talk about projects, technologies, relationships, and life in general. I got many great tips from him, which helped me a lot with my growth. I am thankful for that.”
How did you personally grow in the past months?
“First of all, I gained more experience on CI/CD, AWS, and Serverless technologies. Furthermore, I learned how to work and be productive in a corporate environment. It requires different skills, including complying to the clients’ security rules, managing stakeholders’ expectations, and building relationships with the client.”
“More importantly, I grew emotionally. I have grown fast by coaching others and helping the team to grow. You can always learn new programming languages, frameworks or technologies, but you can’t learn how to communicate better and how to emotionally interact with others in the same manner. This is something that can be hard to accomplish and most of the time you are not even aware of the things you lack. Most of the engineers can’t grow themselves in this way because developer communities are mainly focused on technical growth.”
“To save the best for last, we have a lot of fun together. I developed my skills on Foosball (special thanks to my colleagues). I am always up for a challenge! We have our Foosball games usually right after lunch or during the Friday afternoon with drinks.”
What kind of projects have you done?
“Since I’ve joined Blue Harvest about 6 months ago, I have only had one challenge (that’s what we call a project) so far. This project was for a major Dutch bank. We had to build a cloud-native data analysis application that processes marketing data. There, I worked in a team of 8 which consisted of employees from the bank, colleagues of Capgemini, and colleagues of Blue Harvest.“
How is the work-life balance at Blue Harvest?
“My life is balanced at Blue Harvest. We don’t work over hours. This allows me to put more time and energy into my personal life. It also helps me to stay focused on the client’s project, and at the same time I have time to do hobby projects and focus on my development.”
If you look back these couple of months, do you think you made the right choice to work at Blue Harvest?
“I am glad that I chose this job because consultancy is fun and challenging compared to a job as an internal employee. I get the opportunity to see different clients and to work on challenging projects with a great team.”
