Stefan Kolesnikowicz

Yeah, absolutely. It's a journey and not anybody could just jump into the principal footsteps. You really have to have that experience and that really helps get to where you want to go. As a principal engineer, we focus more on the future of the platform, as I was saying, and firming up processes to make sure there's no gaps in any process or any documentation. We do a lot of peer review, so while we are still contributing and adding code, we do a lot of peer review and shadowing and mentorship for other people on the team. Usually we work side by side with staff engineers, whether they're developers or on the SRE team as well. There’s a lot of mentorship involved. At Achievers, you typically have a project assigned to you and you have an initiative that you’re focused on devoting your expertise to. 

Yeah, there's always different trends that have kind of passed over our industry over the last few years, but the big one that I'm kind of dipping my toes into now is FinOps (Financial Operations), and how that relates back to your infrastructure and costs. Things that are a bit more business oriented than reliability oriented. As you get higher in a company, sometimes your responsibilities get less technical and they go more, in my case, towards financial operations and trying to save money. So I've been using a lot of pooling lately to kind of figure out how much things cost at a very detailed level and trying to write automation around that. So we've done a lot of really cool things here at Achievers to kind of see how much does each little microservice cost us, how much does the buckets cost, how much do the secrets cost? And we've graphed it all out using BigQuery. We're big users of Google Cloud, so we use Google Cloud and BigQuery and we graph everything out so you can easily select your service, your team, and see the trends that your service has been having over the last little bit when it comes to cost. Kubernetes sizing has been another big task that we've accomplished here at Achievers. So any tools that help with optimizing cost, I say definitely go investigate if you’re interested in moving up the “ladder” in this space.

Absolutely. Yeah. We are big fans. A lot of the people that work at Achievers are old school ops guys, old cis admin guys. So we really like the open source community and we try to contribute where we can, but we utilize a lot of the tools. So our stack is based on Kubernetes, we use Argo cd, we're writing things in Go all the time now. We're really kind of embracing a lot of these cloud native tooling. Just recently we started using the KEDA Autoscaler, and this is a really interesting tool because it allows you to advance your Kubernetes autoscaling capabilities by scaling down to zero or having conditionals to scale on multiple objects. So this is something that really relates back to cost too. If you can shrink your infrastructure size and have smarter auto scaling, you're going to save costs. So this was something that we implemented and it's just open source tooling out there on the internet.

Yeah, I mostly do fashion and portrait photography. I kind of got into it on a whim. I had a friend in high school many, many years ago who was always into photography and I took a picture of her. She was a photographer herself and she worked with a lot of modeling agencies and one of them saw my work and thought it was beautiful and it kind of took off from there. I started working with them. I started working with other people in the Toronto fashion scene and just started taking pictures and I got to travel, which was really cool. I got to go to London, England. I got to go to Los Angeles a few times and take pictures and work with agencies kind of in different places around the world. So it was a lot of fun and I kind of just fell into it.

‍
So it was sort of a hobby for a while. But when I was shooting a lot of fashion models, I really wanted to help improve people's careers. This is something that I like to do here at Achievers or anywhere that I work. I really like to help people improve in their career and put them on the right path. So as a photographer, I was doing the same thing. I worked with a lot of models that were just starting their careers, helping build their portfolio, and then they’d get sent off to go work somewhere around the world and become famous models. And then the same thing with music. I did a lot of photo shoots for up and coming musicians in Toronto.

‍

Ooh, a dream guitar. I don't know. That's a great question. I am a big fan of the traditional Strats and Les Paul, so I would probably get a really cool Les Paul, maybe the Peter Frampton black guitar with the three pickups. I'd probably get something slick and all in black.