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Have you met Kristof De Bock? He is a senior fullstack developer and came to Optis through his connections at FlowFactor. He didn’t just bring himself though, but also brought Bram Van Herck into our Optis Family, whose journey you can read here. Wondering how Kristof’s story at Optis unfolded? Read all about it in this article.
As you probably know, Optis and FlowFactor are thick as thieves. So, when an ex-colleague at FlowFactor introduced Optis to her ex-colleague Kristof, her laudatory words and stories triggered him. She convinced him to have a conversation with Keshia and Mathias. It sparked a feeling in Kristof that he liked a lot. Once he’d proven with a technical challenge that his expertise would be of added value to the Optis Family, he made the transition and started here! To this day, he’s extremely enthusiastic about those first meetings and the open atmosphere that he sensed from the get-go.
What interested Kristof most in a new job, was to get more learning and development opportunities. The fact that Optis offered this aplenty was one of the main reasons why he joined us. He wanted to explore new things and not feel like he’d be stuck with technologies that wouldn’t evolve anymore. When asked about it, he indicated that he’s particularly happy about the fact that there are several training possibilities at Optis.
He was pleasantly surprised that there’s the training budget that everyone gets to spend at will, internal knowledge sharing moments (Bits & Bytes), et cetera. It all motivates and engages him. By the way, it’s clear to Kristof that he can learn from juniors just as well as from mediors or seniors. He says he picked up a lot from Iderisse’s talk on serverless, for example. So there, another cliché out the window!
Many of the things Kristof learns, he implements in his job. He’s a fullstack developer on a project at the moment. More specifically, he works on the complete development of features that a business analyst has written. He started from scratch and does the frontend, backend, bug fixing, … Everything. He loves it, he says, because he can truly see his work turning into something tangible. Kristof used to work in React but now had to immerse himself in Angular (and Spring). Moreover, he had to get acquainted with microservice-based architecture and Azure. For some, that might seem like a lot, but to Kristof, it just makes his job more varied, exciting and challenging.
I find Angular such an interesting technology that I’ve signed up to go to a conference! Great that I can take the opportunity to keep learning on all kinds of subjects through Optis!
As many starters at Optis do, Kristof started his journey here at the Optis Factory. He did maintenance work for a client and wrote a tool for another one. Even now that he’s moved on to a fulltime and long-term project, he keeps following up on the work he did for the Factory. That kind of start was reassuring for him, he remarks, as he felt he could catch up on some frontend knowledge as well as get to know new technologies. He says he thinks it’s a better and more interesting way to begin your journey at a new company, instead of having to do simple test projects.
Looking back on his time here at Optis, Kristof is proud of his progress. He’s where he’d envisioned that he’d be at this point, which we applaud him for. He joined our Optis Family for the learning opportunities and the open atmosphere, and he stayed for the exact same reasons. In addition, he points out that he’s very happy with and grateful for his colleagues. In fact, Kristof attends our Bits & Bytes to learn, but most of all to keep the connection with the team.
What the future holds? Kristof is keen to keep discovering new technologies, such as Remix, and to perfect the things that he’s started learning, like Angular.
Did Kristof’s journey and ambition inspire you? Be sure to check our careerpage and become part of our Optis Family!
March 29, 2023
