1. What is your role at Adhese?
I’ve been with the company for five years. I started as a Software Developer, mainly working with Java, but I also took on Redis, so in the meantime I got promoted to the position of Backend Developer. This means my job became a bit more varied. I no longer just write code by myself, but being an expert in my field now, my input is appreciated and I support and assist others in the team as well.
2. What gets you the most excited about coming to work?
Every morning, I bike more than 10km to work, and the one thing that truly gives me the energy to go that extra mile, are the office vibes. It’s just a really lovely atmosphere. At home, I rarely get the feeling I can take a real break, and somehow that makes me less productive. But at the office we organise daily Mario Kart parties that I wouldn’t want to miss out on. It’s the perfect way of getting a breather with colleagues and clearing your head.
3. What is the most valuable skill you learned while working at Adhese?
Redis, our in-memory database. I had never worked with it before starting at Adhese, but it was this thing nobody in the office actually knew much about — so I took ownership of the project and set up the whole integration for the company within my first year on the job. That was quite satisfying.
Back in 2018, I was selected along with two others to participate in Google Hashcode in Ireland — we were the three very best of the Benelux. Joren and Laurens were already working for Adhese back then, I followed suit. And that’s the thing, although I have a Master in Computer Science and joined the company with a lot of prior knowledge and expertise, I still get to learn so much from my colleagues. Joren for example, is our AI expert, which is a skill I want to develop more, so I love how I get to be involved in our AI projects too.
4. What is a recent project you’ve enjoyed working on?
I’ve been working on the optimisation of our bidding process with my colleague Sven — so we can optimise the bidding cost without affecting the win rates. The code is ready, now we only have to test it on a real advertising environment. That’s what I generally like, coming up with my own new features and writing code from scratch.
But what I truly love, is getting my teeth into an existing small piece of code. To optimise it to the fullest, make it perform extremely fast. When I was at university for example, we had an assignment where we had to optimise real code from a biology PHD student. The original code took a day to process, and my fellow students managed to reduce the process time to 50 minutes using a node on the local super computer. I got it down to one minute — with my shabby home computer.
5. How would you describe your experience with the company in one word?
Casual. And I mean this in the best possible way. Like I said, the casual office vibe really helps me being more productive. But it also resonates with my work-life balance. I asked to be hired on a four day work week, because having ADHD, I personally need that bit of extra down time. This naturally being an option with the company, is a great thing.