We're excited to welcome Paul Balogh (@javaducky on Twitter) to the team! As a Developer Advocate he'll focus on SRE as a topic, and on creating and maintaining custom integrations using the xk6 extensions platform. Paul is based in the St. Louis area, in the US.
What made you join k6 / Grafana Labs?
Having had exposure to Grafana and k6 with my previous employer, I already knew they were some solid products. I was really excited about the prospect to engage the community and promote these further as a Developer Advocate. Everyone I've met thus far from Grafana and k6 have been awesome individuals! I'm really looking forward to the camaraderie and learning.
What's your background?
I've been a software developer/architect for over 20 years, wrangling various languages. This is actually my second career! I never really thought of computer science as a career; I was working as an accountant, finishing my university studies and took course on Unix and C++ on a whim. I. Loved. It. So in 1997, I got my first job as a software engineer.
I started my professional software career writing in Visual FoxPro and VisualBasic. I then moved on to Java shortly after Y2K, continuing with that for many years. I've also done some C#, Python, and even a little Perl.
These days I'm all about Golang. I've even become the Meetup organizer for the St. Louis Go Meetup. You can view some of our past sessions on our YouTube channel.
The last few years, I'd been architecting and building microservices while working with various cloud technologies: Kubernetes, Helm, and Kafka -- but also Grafana, Prometheus, and k6. I even contributed to some open source projects; Linkerd and Viper being some of the names you may know. So by now, I'd once again reached a point to slightly pivot my career trajectory: focus more on providing mentorship, teaching, and community building for engineers.
What do you do outside of work?
I enjoy going for rallies with my Mini Cooper owners club. Pre-COVID, I enjoyed playing bass guitar with my bandmates, but now I'm learning to play guitar. I enjoy watching Formula 1 and playing tennis when I'm able.
What will your first order of business be at k6?
Becoming a better tester! I look forward to thinking more about how to better ensure the reliability of applications and services.
During my Week of (Load) Testing I took the extensions ecosystem for a spin. I spent special attention to the customization of k6 with the Extensions API using Golang. I suggested a multi-stage Docker build as a quick fix for a known issue, and found some inconsistencies because of the mix of k6 supported, and community attributed extensions.
How do you slice your pizza? Pizza cutter or scissors?
I use a pizza cutter for creating my slices, but I'll use a fork and knife to eat my pizza because I'm civilized. People raise their eyebrows at that though...
Eager to join a fast growing company? Have a look at our open positions and apply today!