Career – Solidify

Category: Career

Kristoffer Karlsson newest addition to Solidify Göteborg

June 10, 2019

Solidify is growing more than ever and we’re happy to welcome Kristoffer Karlsson to the Gothenburg team. Recently working for companies such as Collector Bank, Systemite and EA DICE, Kristoffer has great software development competencies and will be a valuable addition to our own development team. With a degree in computer science from Chalmers University of Technology and special competence within development and testing, Kristoffer will contribute to both internal and customer software development.

– The best thing about software development is that it involves both creative thinking and problem solving. You’re given the opportunity to work in vastly different domains, which brings variation and encourages new lines of thinking, something I truly appreciate! In addition, I’m driven by a curiosity and will to always learn more to improve on my skills, says Kristoffer himself.

– I’m easily stimulated by working with competent people and a firm believer in prestigelessness where everyone is allowed to contribute, he continues. This is why Solidify fits me perfectly, since I will be given the opportunity to work with some of the best in the industry and where there’s a clear focus on spreading knowledge both within and outside the company.

Welcome, Kristoffer!

Career

Terje Sandstrøm joins Solidify

June 7, 2019

Terje Sandstrom joins Solidify as new Chief Science Officer (CSO). Terje will be a part of the management team, and in addition to the CSO role he will also be acting head of the upcoming Norwegian Solidify department in Oslo.

As a CSO he will be responsible for the Software Development activities in Solidify, working with the development teams to enhance the practices used at Solidify. This is a continuous effort that goes hand in hand with the DevOps practices where Solidify has been the leading Scandinavian company for years.

About Terje

Terje is a former major part owner of a software development company for 15 years, that was acquired by Inmeta/Crayon in 2010. After being with that company for some years, he has been working as an independent consultant, before he now wanted to join Solidify and help it grow further. Terje likes smaller companies that are agile, lean and mean, embracing change and improvement as a culture, and Solidify was a perfect match! He likes to work with teams, both as a participant but also as a coach and mentor.

– Terje is a very experienced and acknowledged professional in the field of software engineering. He has an extensive network in the software development industry in Norway. Terje embodies our company values and it is exciting to finally be able to provide Norwegian clients with the same services we deliver here in Sweden. He will be a critical component to establishing our brand in Oslo and I look forward to seeing the impact we can have on the DevOps and system development market in Norway, says CEO Magnus Juvas.

Terje has been a Microsoft Development Techniques MVP for 10 years since 2009. He has been working with DevOps, coding, testing and project management, but his hearth is really with the coding and quality aspects of that. He loves open source development, and is part of the NUnit core team, and responsible for the Visual Studio Extensions team within NUnit.

Terje’s favorite sayings:

Code should be beautiful!
Code should express the intent of the inventors.
Code should be readable as a good book.
Code should be in the language of the real world domain.

We’re happy to welcome Terje to the team and look forward to what’s about to come.

Career

Daniel Öhrn newest addition to Solidify Stockholm

May 31, 2019

Solidify is growing quickly and we’re now happy to present the newest addition to the Stockholm team – Daniel Öhrn. He will join newly full-time addition Simon Liolios in the development department and work closely with Solidify Labs, specifically on front end development tasks. Daniel recently graduated the same school as Simon and will hit the ground running in regards to teamwork and collaboration.

– I chose to work with Solidify because the company shares my opinion that software projects should be well structured and clearly defined, Daniel says. In my previous experience with techinical support and service, the user experience has always been close to heart. With a great interest for technology and a focus on front end development, it’s a perfect match.

– The most stimulating thing about programming user interfaces is the mix of having to take a user point of view as well as solving the logical problems that arises. In the end, it’s nice to see what you create is actually useful for the end users, Daniel continues.

Welcome to the team, Daniel!

Career

Simon Liolios joins Solidify Stockholm

May 7, 2019

Solidify keeps expanding and the latest addition to the team is Simon Liolios. He’s not a completely new face for the company, however, as he’s been with us for the past six months during the practical part of his education as a front end developer. As a Simon has now gotten used to the way we at Solidify go about our days and we decided to take a short talk with him about his “new” position as developer:

Solidify: Why did you choose Solidify?

Simon: The primary reason I chose Solidify was the potential to improve and learn. To have the opportunity to learn from the expertise already available in the company, regarding everything from methodology to code, to test and finally release felt invaluable. Another compelling reason was the company’s aspiration to use the correct technologies based on needs instead of trying to fit the needs and requirements to the technology.

What will be some typical everyday tasks as a developer at Solidify?

Simon: I will mainly help new and existing customers with their front end development, particularly React, Vue or Angular. However, I will also develop and realize internal ideas from the company, such as for example Azure DevOps extensions.

How does it feel to be a more junior addition to the otherwise senior group at Solidify?

Simon: As mentioned above, being junior in a more senior company is extremely valuable for my own development. I believe that my knowledge of the latest front end technologies in combination with the many year’s experience withing the company are a perfect fit for the new projects we are looking to take on.

We at Solidify are happy to welcome Simon to the company and are looking forward to working together on these types of tasks. Welcome, Simon!

Career

Per Sundqvist and Jens Målare joins Solidify

March 13, 2019

We’re happy to announce that the Solidify team has just been reinforced with talents Per Sundqvist and Jens Målare. They’re both most recently from Sogeti, where they worked with helping customers implement ALM and DevOps principles on the Microsoft stack.

With over 20 years of Software engineering experience and a certified Scrum Master, Per will helps customers with both the process and the tools involved in DevOps. He is a passionate coach and teacher, and consistently recieves very good evaluations and results on his courses. When not at the gym, Per loves to teach courses and to deliver customer specific education and workshops. His own words about the new position:

I’m very excited and look forward to taking on new challenges with the collective competence in Solidify supporting me.

Jens has a background as a C++ developer and has since moved on to various consulting roles and organizations. He is highly competent in DevOps processes such as requirement structuring, agile testing and formal verification of deliverables in the development process. Here’s what he has to say about himself and his new role at Solidify:

I like working together with people and making their development work smoothly on a day-to-day basis. It can be about everything from configuring tools the right way to creating prerequisites for organizations to get insights into and improve their processes and methods.

At Solidify, I’ll have access to a network of colleagues that I can turn to for help, knowledge and experience. I believe that there’s a competitive advantage to a smaller company with quick communication channels and a more personal contact between colleagues.

Welcome to the company, Per and Jens!

Agile

Joachim Rossberg publishes book on Agile Project Management with…

February 18, 2019

We at Solidify are very proud to announce that our colleague Joachim Rossberg has now finished his fourth book, this time on agile project management using Azure DevOps!

Roll up your sleeves and jump into Agile project management to use and customize Microsoft Azure DevOps. Organizations adopt Agile practices because they are a key enabler to run better projects, get more successful end results, and achieve an overall higher quality output. To benefit the most from Agile, you need an Application Life Cycle Management (ALM) or DevOps toolset that supports your style and work environment.

The book, titled Agile Project Management with Azure DevOps: Concepts, Templates, and Metrics, teaches you how to use Azure DevOps to implement many Agile practices such as SAFe, Scrum, and Kanban. In addition, it shows you how they fit into a well-planned Agile implementation. Agile product owners will learn how to work with Azure DevOps to set up a project from scratch, and to continue using Azure DevOps throughout.

The book will be available on amazon on July 26th and you can find it through this link. There you’ll also find Joachim’s earlier publications on agile project management using TFS 2015 as well as ALM with Pro Visual Studio and Pro Visual Studio Team System.

Agile

Reflections on Microsoft LEAP 2019

February 12, 2019

In the beginning of february, the Microsoft LEAP conference took place. LEAP is the program for software architects and developers who are seeking the best possible professional training, delivered from Microsoft in their headquarters in Redmond, WA. Solidify was there, represented by myself and my colleagues Petra Liljecrantz and Therese Berge along with about 300 other attendees.

My own reflections (Magnus)

The conference started with Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud + AI Group giving a keynote about how to use intelligent cloud to solve complex business and developer problems.

The rest of the week consisted of interesting sessions about microservices, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Power BI and Diagnostics in the cloud.

Deborah Chen talked about how to build planet-scale applications with Azure Cosmos DB across any number of Azure’s geographic regions.

Jessica Deen had a nice demo and showed us how to go from “zero to DevOps” using Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines.

My absolute favorite, however, was Noelle LaCharite, talking about solving complex problems with machine learning. She showed us demos of face recognitions, speech analysis, text analysis and bot workflows.

All in all I think the conference was very valuable and gave me good insights into where Microsoft is going with Azure, AI, containers and more.

Petra Liljecrantz’s reflections

Two things that really stuck with me were the session about quantum computing and programming and the session about how Microsoft works with their Azure data centers.

The quantum revolution

John Azariah and Julie Love talked about the quantum revolution and how it will forever alter our economic, industrial and academic landscape. It’s also not that far away actually – Microsoft hopes to have a working quantum computer in 5 years. But what’s fun is that we can start programming with the Quantum Development Kit today and gain massive advantages from that even on classic computers.

Julie told us about an example of those advantages from real life. Microsoft did a comparison on a program that had to make predictions on new traffic routes; a state-of-the-art supercomputer made those predictions in 30 minutes, a classic computer running a performance optimized quantum program written in Q# made the same predictions in 20 milliseconds. Amazing.

Azure DC – land, power, action

This was a great presentation by Rick Bakken on how Microsoft works with their Azure DC’s in terms of land, geography, energy, power and environment. Rick presented how they have worked in the past, the current state and what they are looking to do in the future to have the ultimate data center in terms of performance, availability and environmental friendliness.

He showcased Project Natick, a project aimed at running data centers under water in sealed container-like objects. They had a positive trial run for a couple of months and now they are doing a longer test for 3 years in the water outside of Scotland.

Submerging data centers is a really efficient way to operate them, and here are some of the advantages:

30 days from decision to production operations in the water as opposed to 12-18 months with a data center on land (at the minimum)
Cooled with the help of sea currents which has minimal impacts on the environment and sea life
In normal operations 15% of the electricity is lost in transportation through the wires, nothing is lost under water
You can reach areas of the world not possible on land which results in more coverage and lower latency worldwide

Therese Berge’s reflections

The LEAP conference gave us a lot of inspiration for the future as well as an insight into what’s to come. But two of the sessions I liked the most were sessions about skills and tools I could start using immediately in my daily work.

Full stack Monitoring for Apps & Infrastructure with Azure Monitor – Rahul Bagaria

Rahul talked about Application Insights and Log monitoring which have now been merged into one feature – Azure Monitor. He showed us how we can now get all our logs and monitoring in the same place in Azure, including alerts, metrics and telemetry. They have also improved the analytics and diagnostics in the tool. Some of the features I found interesting:

Full stack visibility for resource groups
Drill down into containers and VMs
Incident and event management with alerts
Visualizations and dashboards
Application map
End-to-end transaction details
Open debug snapshot

.NET 3.0 – Open source Scott Hunter

Another interesting session was one given by Scott Hunter where he talked about the future of .NET. One of the main new features was that they have done a lot of improvement for building web applications. You will now be able to build client side code in .NET, no more need for angular, react or vue etc. The code will run in all browsers and you will also be able to put a break point in Chrome to debug your C# code!

Agile

Jesper Fernström Scaled Professional Scrum (SPS) certified

February 7, 2019

We at Solidify are proud to announce that our colleague Jesper Fernström has added the course Scaled Professional Scrum (SPS) to his Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) license wih Scrum.org. This means that Jesper is now globally recognized as a Nexus Framework subject matter expert and can teach the official Scaled Professional Scrum course from Scrum.org.

The Scaled Professional Scrum course is recommended for development leads, development managers, project/program managers and anyone else involved in coaching, formulating, participating in or managing scaled product development projects using Agile and Scrum.

Here are Jesper’s own words:

The Nexus Framework is my first choice for scaling Scrum and agile. While scaling always brings complexity the Nexus framework keep things simple and to the point, ensuring scaled Scrum is still Scrum. The focus is on identifying and removing dependencies (the nr 1 killer of any large scale efforts) and delivering at least one “Done” integrated increment every sprint. Attending the official SPS course is an awesome way to learn how to deal with the complexities of scaling and possibly also earning a SPS certificate in the process.

Jesper’s first SPS class is scheduled for 2-3 april and is currently the only public SPS class scheduled in the Nordic countries. If you consider attending we suggest you register today as seats are limited.

About Scrum.org and Professional Scrum Trainers

Scrum.org provides the highest quality Scrum training, training materials and certified Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) to teach them. Their training materials are created and maintained by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber, Scrum.org and the PST community members who teach the courses, helping to ensure that they are in tune with what’s happening in software development organizations and always up-to-date with the latest practices.

Professional Scrum Trainers bring their own style and experience to the courses, but use the same materials so that students are learning from the same content regardless of who teaches the course or where it is taught around the world. The result is a tremendously mature and capable set of training materials combined with Scrum experts who work together to realize a shared mission of improving the profession of software development.

Career

This year’s Christmas gift

December 19, 2018

Temperatures drop, snow starts falling all over the country and you hear “Feliz navidad” for the thousandth time this week. We all know what time it is and this year, Christmas feels a little bit extra special for us here at Solidify. In true Christmas spirit, we all need to take care of each other. As a company, we’ve thought a lot about that and decided that the best way for us to take care of each other is to take care of our planet. To do so, we are compensating for our own carbon emissions by investing in Skymining’s Skymines. This is our Christmas gift this year, from us to the planet we all live in.

We’ve previously written about our partnership with Skymining. For the past year, we’ve helped them build software systems surrounding the Skymining process. However, the partnership means a lot more than just a business opportunity – it’s a way for us to help drive change and contribute to helping the environment.

A new story to tell

A large portion of the climate change debate revolves around how to decrease emissions and reduce overall climate impact. Though it is important to take the negative consequences seriously, we believe that a solution-oriented mindset is crucial. To drive change, Skymining believes that we need to closer examine how we view the CO2 itself.

When the world recognizes CO2 as a resource instead of a problem, global warming can be reversed in years – not decades.

– Skymining

Carbon dioxide is everywhere, not just in the atmosphere. Without it, life as we know it wouldn’t exist. This is where the solution lies; considering CO2 as a valuable resource rather than an issue to be avoided. By putting the potential value of the atmospheric CO2 in focus, Skymining takes an entirely new perspective on climate change. They estimate that the size of the carbon mine – the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere available for mining – to be massive enough to solve the entire world’s energy, food and fibre problems.

Reversing the carbon flow

So, there’s a whole lot of a carbon available in the atmosphere. What does this mean from a business perspective, and how does it fit into the bigger picture? Skymining argues that there are three paradigms required to reverse climate change, and that their idea attacks the problem on all three fronts – effectively reversing the carbon flow.

They do so by using what they call Skymines. These are vast fields of specialized crops designed to absorb as much CO2 as possible from the atmosphere. In this process, the crops restore nutrients to the soil underneath. In addition, the crops can later be used to produce carbon negative food, fuel and materials.

Taking responsibility

Climate change is perhaps the biggest issue we as inhabitants of this world face today. The science is clear and the choice is ours – do we continue the mindless way we’ve done so far, or do we act and at the same time take advantage of the opportunities at hand? Here at Solidify, we know what our answer is.

Career

Petra Liljecrantz newest addition to Solidify Stockholm

September 17, 2018

Solidify keeps recruiting and we are happy to welcome Petra Liljecrantz as the newest addition to Solidify Stockholm!

Petra comes most recently from Comprend, where she worked as both .NET developer as well as DevOps engineer. She was responsible for setting and following up on internal code standards, test environment build processes, helping customers with branching strategies, configuring build systems, making sure their continuous delivery process works as intended and much more.In addition, she mentored LIA students and junior developers and is a certified developer for EPiServer CMS 9 since June 2016.

Petras own words about system development and DevOps:

With 10 years experience in system development and a passion for automation, cloud services, structure and efficiency the step to focusing on DevOps was natural. Today businesses need a proper continuous delivery process and pipeline to be able to compete and deliver value to customers, and that is my passion. That´s what I want to help with.

Welcome to Solidify, Petra!

Category: Career

About Terje

Solidify: Why did you choose Solidify?

What will be some typical everyday tasks as a developer at Solidify?

How does it feel to be a more junior addition to the otherwise senior group at Solidify?

My own reflections (Magnus)

Petra Liljecrantz’s reflections

The quantum revolution

Azure DC – land, power, action

Therese Berge’s reflections

Full stack Monitoring for Apps & Infrastructure with Azure Monitor – Rahul Bagaria

.NET 3.0 – Open source Scott Hunter

About Scrum.org and Professional Scrum Trainers ​

A new story to tell

Reversing the carbon flow

Taking responsibility

About Scrum.org and Professional Scrum Trainers