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My first 3 months at Railnova: The Joys of Asynchronous Communications

Post by Nicolas Surleraux, at Railnova
January 26, 2021

Three months have passed since I joined this busy hive! Time has been flying!

I’m still delighted to work with all of you. There were (and there are still) many challenges, and I feel glad that I can count on everyone to help me with those.

The culture at Railnova is very different from what I experienced before, and I have to admit that it is the less stressful one! Having asynchronous communication and task scheduling helps people focus when they need to. I wouldn’t switch back for any reason.

Also, the best decision I took last year was changing from a service-oriented company where you have to do 300x the same thing per year with crazy deadlines to an everyday learning company like Railnova. I learned a lot in quite a short period while having an outstanding life balance (it is not easy to admit your day is done at 6 PM when you were used to working until 9 PM every day before). I also really like that Railnova respects the schedule of everyone when having to start later / leave earlier / take a break to run errands, go for my morning walk, or my driving lessons!

I learned a lot on the technical side too! Railnova has a massive infrastructure with services like RabbitMQ, Kafka, Kubernetes, and several Python apps running across dozens of servers. To manage and monitor such an infrastructure, I learned about SaltStack, Grafana, Prometheus. Also, I could finally see what a significant infrastructure managed in Terraform looks like: many modules, custom providers…

Also, I feel proud because I started working with other colleagues on products that add value for clients, like interfacing the Savvy protocol into our powerful interface or increasing the release velocity of the embedded software in our Railsters.

Finally, I want to say thank Cedric in particular. He has been very educational and patient with my straightforward / “let’s jump into action and think after” character (I am working on it!) Also, thank you to everyone for making Railnova what it is today and giving everyone such a fun, safe and high-quality environment.

I am 100 % sure that 2022 will bring only good things as we have the tools and the team to tackle any problem!

Until then, enjoy!
Nicolas

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