Gijs has been with spriteCloud and Calliope Pro longer than most staff members, he has actually even outlived a few founders. Today he is the Product Owner and Lead Developer of Calliope Pro but he didn’t always work in those roles.
As today marks his eight-year anniversary with spriteCloud and Calliope Pro and we thought it would be great to chat with Gijs and learn about how these past eight years have been.
Take a moment to hear from Gijs and learn a little more about what working at spriteCloud and Calliope Pro has been like as the companies have grown.
Can you tell us why you decided to join spriteCloud and Calliope Pro?
I joined spriteCloud first as a freelancer. After working together for a year, I was looking for the stability of a fixed contract while working 32 hours a week.
Doing functional/technical/automated testing for about 5 years, my heart was still longing to be a developer. With my testing experience built up, I felt like I was the perfect fit to move Calliope to where it is today.
You’ve been at Calliope for 8 years now, what were those first few years for you like?
8 years… time flies when you’re having fun 😉 I really enjoyed my time with Calliope, learning a lot about Ruby on Rails and loving to solve complex programming problems.
How would you say your role and the work changed over the years?
I’ve moved from executing (automated) tests in the background, to becoming client facing, to recommending how to move forward, to setting up complete test automation frameworks by myself.
Internally my role moved toward welcoming new colleagues, getting them set up and creating tutorials. Currently I’m in the assets team, the team that advises on hardware, also I’m the product owner and lead developer of Calliope.
What are the next challenges you want to take up?
I want to improve Calliope to really show all the statistics and information a user needs. I want to make it a new standard in the testing world.
Can you tell us a little about what you do at Calliope Pro and its relationship with spriteCloud?
Like I said earlier, I’m the product owner and lead developer for Calliope.
The relation to spriteCloud goes back a long time, when Mark Barzilay created an application to display Cucumber test automations results.
This is still the core idea of Calliope, to show the test results of automated tests. But now it supports a lot more result types, like performance, security and a lot of other frameworks.
What would you say has been the biggest change at Calliope over the last 8 years?
Moving from a Cucumber test runner to a universal test result system.
Where do you see Calliope in the coming 2 or 3 years?
Any development team that takes testing slightly seriously will have Calliope set up to keep everyone up to date with the results.
Finally, could you sum up what working at Calliope means to you in a sentence?
The most challenging and rewarding projects I’ve worked on.
Thanks for telling us about your experiences with spriteCloud and Calliope Pro. Congratulations again on your eight-year anniversary and we can genuinely say that this organisation would not be the same without you!
