Tech
Jun 13, 2019
Tatiana, the DevOps Queen at Wolt: “Haskell is the only beautiful thing in the world”
Did you know that Wolt’s tech stack is a lot broader than a single mobile app? We build all our tech in-house and wanted to write a bit more about what we do, and who actually does the developing here. In this blog series, we’re interviewing our engineers to give you a glimpse into the dev life at Wolt. In today’s post we’re featuring Tatiana Koroleva, who is the DevOps Queen at Wolt.
DevOps engineering is an integral part of Wolt’s product team, as they work together with the development teams in order to make sure Wolt provides a good service while also maintaining the desired pace for releasing new features, providing self-service where it makes sense, and transferring knowledge so that people can do their job as easily as possible. The DevOps team has a unique chance to work with modern technologies, develop in the direction they choose, and at the same time enjoy the freedom and mutual trust of a startup company spirit.
What do you do here?
I do DevOps engineering, which means a balance of development and operational work, all serving one common goal – to support the current platform, constantly calibrate in order to have a balance between velocity and reliability of the services we run.
How long have you been at Wolt?
I’ve been working at Wolt for 1 year and 2 months.
Why did you choose to work here?
I moved to Helsinki and was open to finding something new after working at Veeam Software. Wolt’s recruiter, Laura, found me on LinkedIn and here we are.
What’s the most interesting technological challenge you’re currently working on?
It is hard to choose the most interesting one, I’m here for the tech stack and there are a lot of exciting tasks. Each task, I enjoy it. Currently we are taking Apache Kafka into use for a wide variety of use cases, improving how we handle secrets in our applications, making changes to our CI/CD pipelines to make them more simple and reliable, hardening security on different levels, evaluating various as-a-service solutions to take the unnecessary load off the humans, and free up time for meaningful work. For me the end goal is to automate myself out of the job.
“We’re taking Apache Kafka into use, improving how we handle secrets in our applications, making our CI/CD pipelines more simple and reliable.”
What’s the most difficult technical problem you’ve encountered during your time at Wolt?
The biggest challenge is to overcome the technical debt that has been accumulated throughout the years. In addition, learning together with people how to think in terms of speed of delivering new features vs. reliability and how to track it so that we can answer a simple but important question – when moving fast, how fast is too fast?What technologies do you use?Kubernetes, Postgres, MongoDB, Kafka, Redis, EFK Stack – to name a few.
Favorite programming language and why?
Haskell because it’s the only beautiful thing in the world.
How can developers develop themselves at Wolt?
It’s super important to keep learning, and at Wolt we have different trainings on a regular basis. There is a biweekly backend competence meeting for developers where the knowledge on various technologies is being shared. Currently we have a training on how Kubernetes internals work and the Kubernetes networking. Of course, for the newcomers, we offer training on how we run things. A detailed course on Mongodb is TBD. Also, we encourage people to keep learning. If someone wants a book, we order it, always. If people want to take a course, they can. If they want to attend an event or conference, they can for sure.
