My Journey to Serverless
It all started with a single tweet:
I was ready for my next move and I knew exactly what I wanted to work with. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen so clearly what I’ve wanted to work on in my career. To be a part of a team that was experienced with serverless would be tricky when so many companies were entrenched with microservices.
But why my enthusiasm?
After spending some time working with startups, and then being a CTO and co-founder of one for several years, the benefits were crystal clear. You need to be up and running, fast. You need to be agile to change, fast. You need to be able to handle unpredictable events, fast. You also need to be able to do this as cheaply as possible.
PaaS providers, such as Heroku, have been great for startups. Concentrating on business logic is exactly what you need to be doing. Getting services up and running with confidence and limited staff. PaaS gets close to what’s needed, however, it’s likely that you have to perform a lot of rework when you start hitting scale.
Before leaving my startup, I had a number of candidate features for implementing in serverless. Unfortunately circumstances meant I didn’t get to implement them. I made a few prototypes, in my spare time, but some toy personal code wasn’t enough. I needed to see it working at scale, create with experts around me and so I needed to find companies actually using it and not just dipping their toe in the water.
So I tweeted.
I had a few replies in my DM’s and spoke to each of them to find out more. One being a company that looked incredibly polished and professional… and yet somehow I’d never heard of them!
I’m always interested when I’m being interviewed about how a company approaches the process. DAZN’s has possibly the best I’ve had in years. It’s not particularly unique by today’s standards: there’s a screening phone call, a technical test and an onsite interview. What is especially good is how well they communicated the steps of the process. I knew what to expect at every point and there were no tricks.
I was surprised about how large DAZN actually are and how little people know about them in the UK. There are quite a few people talking at conferences, from the company, but because they haven’t launched in the UK, it’s relatively unknown. And yet they now have three office floors in London, as well as offices in Leeds, Amsterdam, Poland and people working remotely from other countries… and they’re growing.
I’ve been at DAZN now for coming up to 3 months.
I’m working on an incredibly exciting project and have worked with quite a lot of AWS. Including Lambda, Lambda Step Functions, Kinesis, SNS, SQS, S3, DynamoDB, and lots more, such as Drone and Terraform!
It hasn’t felt like being thrown into the deep end because I’m working with some incredibly clever and supportive co-workers. Also, a lot of my past experiences and knowledge are perhaps more applicable than I may have thought.
This couldn’t have been a better move for me. I’m working with the exact technology I wanted to. My coworkers are incredibly clever but supportive with it. The company culture is caring and inclusive. The product is really interesting and has lots of users and a growing customer base.
DAZN are hiring!
In particular we are looking for senior level Backend and Frontend developers. If you want to know more do get in touch directly with me.
Add me on Twitter and my DM’s are open: https://twitter.com/ChrisWestcottUK
Header photo by Ian Schneider and message in a bottle photo by Jeff Kepler.
