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What Makes a Successful Web Dev: Stefan Judis, Front-End Dev Expert

What makes a successful web dev? We interview Berlin-based front-end expert Stefan Judis who works for Contentful leading developer relations.

What makes a successful web dev? We interview Berlin-based front-end expert Stefan Judis. Stefan works for the content management platform Contentful leading developer relations. Whether it is by tweeting, writing, or streaming, he loves sharing his web development expertise with the broader community. He also helps maintain Tiny helpers and Random MDN.

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Let’s start from the beginning. How did you get started in technology?

I started working in a completely different field after school. I was working as a sound engineer, and I worked in German television. So, what I did for a couple of years was mixing stuff mainly for sports TV shows. But then I figured out that I didn’t want to do that my whole life, that that wasn’t going to fly going forward. So, I thought, well, you’ve been always good with computers.

Then I started studying here in Berlin, where I learned to program stuff. So, it all began with a little bit of C++ and Java and these kinds of things that you learn at university. Berlin is a very start-up-heavy city, so I landed an internship working with Magento and PHP – not real front-end stuff like we do these days; that was not really a thing yet back then. But yeah, I took my first internship and from then I just jump from company to company and learned that I love the web and love writing and creating content around web technologies.

What made you fall in love with web development?

I’ve always liked the visual aspect of it. When I started, I was really into the Magento stack and I thought it was kind of cool, but I always liked the whole visual animation part of doing web development. And when I started, it was still the early days. Then, you know, slide up, slide down, fade in, fade out, all of these tiny functions. But II found these incredibly appealing. And then slowly but surely, front-end development became a real thing. Then more complexity got into that, and I was completely hooked by all this new technology that was coming out. Then I found out that building for the web is fun. And since then, I tried to build the best stuff possible.

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What was the hardest part of your transition into tech?

Well, especially in web development, learning is difficult. I have been doing web dev for 10 years, and when I started, I was incredibly impressed with what people were doing there. So, I remember I was sitting next to a colleague, and they opened their terminal, and they were doing some fancy stuff in this black window and I was like, “holy moly this is a completely different world.”

I think it was rather challenging to figure out what exactly I had to know. What should I know how to do? But also building a career around that. I think it’s also important to figure out what you actually like.

So, even though now I say that I specialise in front-end technologies, that took me quite a while. Then, I would say that it took me two or three years to figure it out and get a clearer picture of what is actually out there. And it’s only getting worse, especially in the front-end sphere, because there’s just so much technology out there. A lot of people keep asking me: “Hey Stefan, what should I learn?” And I’m like, “well, good luck figuring that one out.” So, I think that is definitely a challenge that we have at the individual level, but also at the industry level, because there’s just so much stuff happening these days.

Given how many open fronts there are these days, what would you recommend to those who don’t know what to focus on?

For people who are just entering the industry: do whatever is fun and useful, really, because there’s so much stuff to learn and it feels very, very overwhelming. Build your website, get it off the ground and do whatever is fun and useful. But what I usually recommend to people is: don’t forget to be curious about the technology when doing so.

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What we see right now is that there are a lot of people just learning a framework when they enter the industry. And, while that is great to get a product off the ground, I think it’s very important to understand what is actually going on. I’m a big fan of the pillars of the web, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and I think it’s still important to have a very good fundamental knowledge of these technologies. And these are huge areas by themselves. You cannot be an expert in all three areas, especially when you have frameworks on top and that and maybe something on top of the frameworks. But I think curiosity and having this drive to say: “Ok, I’m using that. But how does it actually work?” — I think that’s very important to become a good web developer.

In your experience, what separates a good web dev from a great one? Is it soft skills, or is it more about hard skills? What make a successful web dev?

I think there are two areas. Soft skills are usually a very underrated thing when we speak about software developers. Being a team player in general, I think this is definitely a crucial part of a solid career. Being humble, being helpful, all the kinds of things that make you a good team player. That’s something, for example, that probably should have been taught at university when I studied. Good or great teams or developers really depend on soft skills. And I would love to have the industry focus a little bit more around that.

And speaking from the technology side of things, I think a great web developer is someone who always puts the user first. What happens in web development right now is that we have a lot of technology fatigue. We’re using the latest and greatest just because it is the latest and greatest or just because everybody is doing it. So, what I see very often are overengineered sites and products where something simpler would have done the job.

There’s nothing wrong with building something with the latest and greatest when you’re playing around and you’re building your own blog. But when you’re building a commercial product, I think it’s very important to take a step back and think: “Hey, did that make the whole thing slower, or is it now more inaccessible or is it less robust just because we wanted to use the latest and greatest technology?” I think great developers keep the bigger picture in mind and think about the user to build the best possible product. Because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re paid for. We’re not paid for playing with tech. We are paid for building something great.

What would you say are the top three soft skills a successful web dev should have?

I would say it’s the usual things, from being helpful to being humble. Putting yourself into the shoes of your colleagues and customers, I think that is a very underrated skill. Very often it always feels like everything is on fire and everybody wants something. But very often, and I’m guilty of that myself, it’s necessary to take a deep breath and think about where the other person is coming from. I think this is very valuable when it comes to building a career or working together in teams.

One piece of advice that I received a few years ago and that I now keep close to my heart is that when you’re working it can get quite stressful, always under pressure. And very often, what happened to me is that I had this kind of “anti-” mode. I was like, “everything is too much.” And I just ranted a lot to other people. And I once ranted in a situation where the person was in front of me. They went like: “Stefan, I feel you, I empathise with you, but what’s the solution?” And I didn’t have one. I just wanted to rant.

Since then, when I really had the feeling that something had to change or something was really going on with my nerves. Try to think about the solution first and then propose that to colleagues, your bosses, your mates or whoever is around you, because very often ranting doesn’t solve the problem. And it’s very easy to rant instead of changing something. And that’s something that I learned and that I have kept with me for a couple of years now. And it’s definitely helpful.

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From Mastering SAP to Controlling Cars with a Phone: Interview with Denise Nepraunig, iOS Dev

We interview Denise Nepraunig, a Berlin-based iOS developer who decided to pursue her passion for Apple after 13 years in the SAP ecosystem.

Interview with Denise Nepraunig, a Berlin-based iOS developer who decided to pursue her passion for Apple after 13 years in the SAP ecosystem. She’s now a Swift and iOS dev at CARIAD, the Volkswagen Group’s automotive software development division. This is what she did, why she did it, and how you can do it too.

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Interview with Denise Nepraunig

You worked with SAP for many years. Why the change in career focus?

I started out within the SAP ecosystem about 13 years ago, working for an SAP customer, then I had a short stop at an SAP consultancy and, finally, I ended up at SAP itself. The thing was that SAP is really great to work with, and it also pays very well to have SAP skills. But they are really specialised, so it can be hard to transfer them to another company or environment. It’s also hard in terms of resources. Then. things like blog posts or stack overflow questions, they are hard to get by.

Plus, after doing SAP stuff for so long, I really wanted to break free from all of it and diversify my skillset so that I could work anywhere. The last two or three years at the company, I had the chance to get started with some iOS development, and I found it really exciting, I loved it.

So, I’m an Apple fangirl, and I thought writing your own apps for the platform was really cool. Swift makes it a lot easier than Objective-C, with which I had failed in the past. But at SAP we were still using our own frameworks within iOS and stuff like that, so I felt a bit stuck inside this ecosystem.

Then I had the opportunity to interview at Volkswagen, and I saw that they hadn’t created too much stuff for iOS yet. And It was a really good opportunity for me. I joined last December, so I’m a few months in. To be honest, it was quite scary to leave my extensive SAP experience and network behind, but so far I don’t regret it a single bit.

Now I am working on apps with which you can remotely control car features like climatization. It’s also really fascinating to have hardware involved. At SAP you just controlled software or business processes and now you can control a car. It’s like being a kid with a remote-controlled car, but with a real car instead.

So, you basically went from writing code for B2B applications to doing it in the B2C space? What are the biggest differences you have noticed?

For one thing, and in my case, you’re much more closely connected to the customer, and your sprint and your tasks inside the sprint can change very quickly depending on what problems arise or the feedback on the App Store.

Also, I feel more connected to my work. You directly know the end-users, everybody in your everyday life has experience with cars, but hardly anyone else has experience with ERP systems. Volkswagen also has a lot more customers. It has a whole different scale than SAP. Some projects I worked on, yeah – it’s really exciting. I was looking exactly for this.

What’s the best career advice you have ever been given?

The best piece of advice has definitely been that I should network a lot. And that was really important when joining a big company like SAP. There are just so many different things which you are dependent on, whether it is a cloud platform, or a web framework, or stuff inside SAP itself… You need to know people, and it helps tremendously if you know the right person. And that’s also true in terms of careers. For example, if you know someone in another department, you can easily get a job there just because you know the person.

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There are also some cool events that SAP had, where I got the chance to be a speaker at and so on. So this was a tremendous experience inside the SAP family. My first manager at SAP actively supported me in this process, encouraging me to travel to conferences and speak there. I had the opportunity to travel to different countries and experience different cultures.

What’s the biggest challenge you have faced in your career?

Before I was in the IT business, I was a secretary. I had no formal IT education and was coding as a hobby. I used automation in Microsoft Excel a lot and very basic stuff like that, and it made me decide I wanted to be a developer.

But trying to get the right education and my first job without having any experience was very, very hard. It was the biggest challenge, and overcoming it involved a bit of luck too. I heard about a job from a former university professor of mine. It was SAP-related, but not in development. I was first a project assistant and then kind of worked my way up to developer. I knew I had to do other stuff to end up where I wanted. I had also studied communications engineering, so I had all those skills in my CV already. But work experience is so important in this field, and getting the first job was super hard.

Is that something you would recommend to newcomers who are struggling to get into the field, starting with something related and moving up?

Yeah, I think so. You can do this in a big company in particular, but also in small companies. There one wears many hats, and it’s also easier to look over the shoulder of other people, because it’s smaller. I think that, if you can’t directly get a developer job, try to sneak in through somewhere and work your way up.

Hos was your particular experience in larger companies?

Well, for me, my developer career really took off in terms of knowledge when I joined SAP. Before, I worked in teams that were rather small. There were one or two developers who most of the time did a plethora of things. So, I was writing code, but I did not feel that I was able to get better at it. I wrote the same things, again and again.

But, when you join SAP, there are eight people working on the same problem all together. And a lot of people are smarter than you, obviously. It was the first time I ever heard about unit tests and other things I now take for granted. You don’t do this on your own if you’ve never been exposed to it. So that was tremendously helpful. And, also, in a big company, if something else interests you, it’s easier to move to another department instead of looking for a whole new job entirely. It was really a great experience. I mean, big companies sometimes move slowly and can be frustrating when it comes to some processes, but you learn a lot.

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From Stay-at-Home Mom to Full-Time Web Developer: An Interview with Olena Drugalya

Our interview with Olena Drugalya, a self-taught front-end developer who just recently managed to go from being a stay-at-home mom to a full-time dev.

The first part of our interview with Olena Drugalya, a Berlin-based, self-taught front-end developer who just recently managed to go from being a stay-at-home mom to a full-time dev. Born in Ukraine and having lived and worked across Europe, Olena discusses her transition into tech, the barriers she encountered along the way and how other women can overcome them.

Learn of Olena’s progress with her account after two months into her first developer job.

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Interview with Olena Drugalya: Congrats on your new job! You made it. How did you go from stay-at-home mom to full-time developer?

Thank you! My transition into tech was a long and winding road of failure, hard work and, eventually, success. So, let’s start from the beginning.

I graduated in linguistics and law, but I never worked as a lawyer. Fresh out of university, I found a job at a trading company as a translator, as there was a huge demand for speakers of foreign languages at that time in Ukraine. I worked in the company for 10 years and was promoted a couple of times, ultimately becoming an executive manager.

What happened then?

Then I met my husband and we got married. We moved to another town, and I worked remotely for some time, but it didn’t go too well because my daughter was born, and I didn’t take maternity leave. Not long after that, I was already burned out from the job, from having a baby, from the move. So, I quit my job.

But, after some time, my daughter had grown older, and I started to think about what I would like to do next in my life, my career possibilities, etc.

My husband is a software developer, so he suggested that maybe I could find a development job in our city. There was a coding academy that offered a course on software development on the weekends, so that worked for me as my husband could watch my daughter during the weekends. I learned there for two years and graduated as a .NET developer. After that I graduated, I participated in several projects. I even built an online game and actually got some money for it. So, I was like, OK, I can do it.

And then…

Then I decided to try to get a job at a company, not just freelancing. But at that time, in Ukraine, it was very difficult for a woman to enter the tech world if she didn’t have a computer science degree. So, I had a couple of interviews, and that was a failure. A total disaster.

So, after a range of failed interviews that got me discouraged, I decided that tech was not for me. I always thought that, for being a developer, you needed a special mindset, and that I just didn’t have it. And everyone around me seemed to think the same, except, of course, for my husband. But I was too unmotivated and frustrated. So, I stopped. I decided it was not for me, that I would try something else.

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We moved to Denmark, where I got a job as an office manager. I was quite happy with the job, since we had just moved in, and I could learn Danish and do something useful instead just sitting at home. But while working there, I realised that, in western Europe, the situation with women in tech is totally different. In fact, tech companies encourage and offer women enormous possibilities in the tech industry. That made me think about tech again, and I decided to give it another shot. This time I started with web development and that’s what I’m doing right now. We moved to Berlin, and I recently got a job as a junior software developer at IT services provider Novatec. And I love it.

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You mentioned how hard the interview process was at times. What would you say to people who are going through failed interview after failed interview? How can they keep their spirits up?

Above all, that you just must keep going no matter what. If you really want this job, if you really want to work in tech or in any other industry, you just need to learn from your failures and just move on and try again. Failing at an interview doesn’t mean that you are not good in what you are doing. Sometimes there is just a better candidate, or the company has a different profile in mind. It often just means it’s not the right time or the right company for you because they are looking for something else.

Do you think your background in humanities has helped you in tech?

Absolutely. Knowing a lot of languages, for example, has helped me a lot. Speaking English is a big plus in this industry, and I can speak German too. There are a lot of wonderful developers out there who are missing out on great opportunities because they don’t know languages. All technology now is made in English. Plus, if you know how to learn a language, you know how to quickly learn new structures and words. You can directly apply that to learning a programming language. You learn the grammar, the syntax. The same goes for fluency. In order to get fluent, you just need to write code often. You just need to treat programming just like any other language.

How do you combine your job, learning and raising kids, especially during lockdown?

You need to have a daily routine. Otherwise, you will always feel like you don’t have enough time. I was lucky to have the help of my husband. When my son was little, I usually studied for two hours after he went to bed.

That was, of course, tiresome, because usually you don’t feel fresh anymore in the evenings. But I had no other choice. But the first lockdown actually helped me a lot with goals, as my husband started to work from home, and we shared the time with the kids. From morning until noon, he was with the kids, and I was with the kids from noon until the evening. I had my two or three hours to myself every day, and that was fantastic. Then I jumped right away into the 100 days of code challenge. I made a habit of coding every day for at least one hour. And I have been doing it every single day since. So, yes, the daily routine is very important.

You are very active in the dev community, sharing development tips and your journey into tech. Why do you enjoy blogging, how has it helped you?

I started my blog when I started my studies as a web developer. First, I wanted people just to know my story about being a stay-at-home mom and learning web development. I was hopeful it could encourage other women like me who were afraid of transitioning into tech. But as I proceeded with the study, I started to write posts about topics I was learning at the time.

I thought that many blog posts or YouTube videos out there were not really that beginner-friendly, often being written in a rather complicated language. So, I decided to try to write down these difficult concepts just in a simple language, just for myself. If you manage to understand something by writing about it, you actually learn it more deeply. Then I saw others were struggling with the same problems and decided to share these materials with the broader community.  

I encourage everyone to start writing the blog. It’s one of the best ways to learn by yourself because you need to research something and then you have to explain what it is and what it does, and how you can use it. It’s also a great way of holding yourself accountable and make sure you keep progressing towards your goals.

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Interview with microsoft Wesley Backelant: Becoming data-driven is more than just saying you are data-driven (Part 2)

Part two of our interview with Microsoft cloud solution architect Wesley Backelant. We discuss his role and what's ahead for the cloud industry.

The second part of our interview with Microsoft cloud solution architect Wesley Backelant, in which he talked about his role, what the job entails and what’s ahead for the cloud industry.

A Microsoft insider, Wesley Backelant is a Belgian cloud solutions architect who works together with the company’s customers to engineer and deploy impactful data and advanced analytics projects. Among other things, Wesley is an expert on the various components of the Azure AI platform. He is also a frequent speaker at numerous community events and regularly shares Azure news and tips.  

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Interview with Wesley Backelant: What part of being a cloud architect at Microsoft do you enjoy the most?

There are a couple of aspects that make it very interesting to me, personally. One of them, and that’s probably one of the benefits of being at a company like Microsoft, is leading the space in terms of innovation and cloud. You are at the forefront of technology, and that’s what I like. I like new stuff. Every time I get to learn something new, I see it as an incredible challenge, and I really love doing these things and getting my hands on new stuff and new technologies. That’s what drives me from a technological standpoint.

But the other thing that I really like about being in the data and BI space is that it puts you in a position where you are not just talking about technology, you’re also talking about business and societal outcome. One of our customers, for example, is in the public transportation space, and the fun part there is that, when you do something that’s innovative with them, you know that it´s going to have an impact on people and that it’s going to improve the experience of a hundred thousand or millions of people. To me, that’s one of the more rewarding parts of my job. Seeing a project succeed is fun, but seeing it drive real impact is the real deal.

At the technical level, what do you love most doing as part of your job?

Making it all work together. Azure is a continuously evolving platform. New things pop up all the time. Figuring out where all those things fit together and how you can make things more efficient and cost-effective is one of the role’s key drivers and, honestly, quite fun. Matching what we deliver as a technology to something that can actually provide value to the customer by leveraging existing building blocks.

Also, coding is not so much part of my job officially, but it’s still something I love to do, because it’s quite tangible. You get to see the result pretty immediately, and that’s a lot of fun.

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What tools do you like using the most?

I would be obliged to say Azure SQL Database is my favourite tool, as SQL is my old love, but that wouldn’t be entirely fair, especially, if you look at what we’re doing today with open source. I’d like to split my answer between cloud and open source.

Containers and Kubernetes are clearly changing the way people are building software these days. I talk a lot with start-ups and partners, and pretty much all of them are building stuff based on containers and mostly Kubernetes as an orchestrator. It’s impressive to see what the impact of these tools has been in the relatively little time that they’ve been around for. We are also seeing them as a big foundation for our own services.

Then there’s open source. For example, something people sometimes forgets is that, whenever you have a service that has to run in production, you need proper monitoring and alerting. It’s not the most fun part of building a solution, but it’s one of the most crucial steps when you want to do something seriously. We have Azure Monitor, which is a great tool that I strongly recommend, but at the same time, I’m a huge fan of open-source solutions like Prometheus and Grafana. Luckily, they have integrations with Azure Monitor, so that makes them even more interesting. What amazes me of the open-source world is the community, and the power of the community, how the community sets the direction in a lot of ways. Even the big players follow the direction set by the community. That’s quite nice to see.

As a data expert, what’s the biggest issue you are seeing with data these days?

I think we all know the challenges from a more technical point of view, so data quality, governance, etc, to me things that between quotes we can easily solve with technology. But one of the biggest challenges I see with customers is being more data-driven. It sounds like a marketing term, but it really is not.

I really believe most companies are aware there’s a lot of value in the data they have, in applying machine learning or even good reporting. But getting into thinking what’s the difference I can make with this data, and do I have the proper environment and organisation in place to really benefit from it? That’s where I still see a lot of companies struggle. If I were a c-level person, that’s probably the question I would ask myself – are we organised to benefit from all the data and what it can bring to our company? Becoming data-driven is more than just saying you are data-driven. It also means having a proper organisational structure in place together with technology and tools.

Interview with microsoft Wesley Backelant: What’s next for cloud?

One of the things is that I still see too much of is that there’s still a strong focus on infrastructure. I still see a lot of IT departments that can tell you what server or specific IP address is hosting an application or service.

Things can change, the infrastructure can scale in or out. It shouldn’t matter to you. I really believe that infrastructure part is one of the things will see disappearing over time. One of the best things about cloud is agility, and when people start really to adopt the whole serverless idea, and also DevOps as a philosophy, that’s the point where we’ll really see the whole power of cloud.

Secondly, at Microsoft we strongly believe in the intelligent cloud and edge. Bringing some part of that computing power, or at least how it works closer to where the data is, is definitely also an area where there is a lot of innovation happening these days. The big challenge is, obviously, making it all work seamlessly together. We are definitely doing progress there. But I still think there’s going to be a lot of new developments in this area still. And, thirdly, there is the abstraction of where things are running. If you look at tools like Azure Arc, basically, Kubernetes is having a big impact on that whole story. Being able to host your solutions be it on the public cloud, your own cloud or multiple clouds and having it all seamlessly work together from an operational standpoint and management point of view – that’s also where cloud is going.

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Also, make sure to check out his blog: My long term memory for data and development related information.

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You need to share your knowledge and not just keep it to yourself

Cloud solutions architect and Microsoft Azure MVP Karel De Winter discusses his career in IT and shares tips for advancing your cloud career.

An interview with Microsoft Azure MVP Karel De Winter to discuss his trajectory in IT and how to advance your cloud career.

Karel de Winter is a Belgian cloud solutions architect working at Azure Expert managed cloud services provider DexMach. He is passionate about helping others in the cloud community grow and develop their expertise. Whether it is on Twitter, on his blog, or at an industry event, Karel is constantly sharing news and resources that will help you make the most of the power of cloud.

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Interview with Karel De Winter from Azure: How did you get started in technology?

I was about seven when I started to play around with some old computers. The first things you learn are the basic commands like DIR and CD. And, from that moment on, I just wanted to learn more about computers in general and what you could do with them. So, getting into IT was all about doing what I love to do and the things that I was playing around with. The hardware that was given to me by family, by neighbours; I was looking to improve that hardware, making all those things work together.

Then the Internet came and became this living thing. And a lot of things happened from there. I joined some local communities in Belgium and learned about a lot more besides computers. I learned a little bit of programming, I learned to build websites. It was just the beginning of the web, so it was all about playing around, building websites and making music and then putting the music on those websites.

That is how it all started. And now I have around 14 years of experience in IT. I have always worked with Microsoft partners, and every company I worked with had the possibility to try out the Microsoft products, to try new things, to test them, and then implement them together with customers.

Interview with Karel De Winter:What about Azure?

The same thing happened with Azure. The platform is about 10- or 11-years old right now, so I started to play with Azure in the very beginning. I got interested at a local community event. Somebody was showing something from Azure Storage; you could put your files on a storage account or you could run your SQL environments and servers on Azure.

I was curious about all those things and how they worked together. So, I got involved with the Azure community in Belgium and attended several sessions. And I immediately saw the benefit of cloud products. But I must say that, ten years ago, Azure was not the Microsoft Azure platform that we now know. A lot has changed since then. So, it was a lot of exploration and investigating what was possible, always learning new things through the process. That is how, throughout my career, I went from being a systems engineer to making cloud architectures and other related things.

Interview with Karel De Winter from Azure: And what are you up to these days?

My main focus so far has been on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). But, since I started working at DexMach as a solutions architect, a lot of things have changed. Now I am focusing more on the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) side of things and everything around governance, making sure that we have a good landing zone and keep security in mind. Those are the things I now focus on.

Now I am designing architectures, but also doing a bit of pre-sales. Together with our team, we help to make proposals for customers so that they are having a clear understanding of the cost and architecture of the Azure environment. Aside from that, I’m also a competence lead, which means that I am responsible for all platform related projects and guidelines related to Azure. So, I am looking at, for example; how we can use Azure Stack HCI as a hybrid solution for our customers, or how we can standardize platform-as-a-service in Azure with Azure Functions, Logic Apps or Web Apps. Even Kubernetes comes into play when a customer wants to keep full control. I am making sure that everything is secure, that everyone who works in the team is on the same page (we have standards that we need to implement with every customer).

What is your advice for more junior Azure experts?

My number one piece of advice for junior Azure experts would be that learning is important. It is so important that you have to do it for the rest of your life. Especially because a lot is changing in cloud. It is going very, very quickly. So, if you are not learning day by day, six months later you are behind your competitors. You need to keep on learning and keep doing new things.

If you want to start with Azure, just go with Microsoft Learn. That’s a very good starting point. You have different paths you can follow. So, if you are a junior and you don’t know which area or which track you should go for, this is the way to go. You have the ability to sign up for free and have a complete Azure environment in a sandbox and see what is working for you. You can see if you are doing a lot of development things, or enjoying the web development part, or if you are an infrastructure guy like me. Or are maybe more into VMs, more into Kubernetes and managing all those things, networking, storage, etc. Just have a look at that.

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What about official certifications, what would you recommend focusing on?

You can’t learn everything in these times of digital revolution, there is just too much information. But when preparing for an official Microsoft you should start by looking at the PDF that’s on the page of the exam. There you will find the exam skills outline. All the topics covered in the exam are listed with some percentage at the end. And you should aim to learn by that percentage. The skills measured with the highest percentage must be also your highest learning priority and the biggest investment in time. That’s something I always do. My main focus will be on the biggest parts, and then, if I have time to go into a really deep dive, I will look into the other parts.

Learn more with our article: The Most Popular IT Certifications

What’s the best career advice you have been given?

Networking is important because, for example, if you are going for a job interview and they have two people with a very similar resume (same certificates and experience) but the one person knows somebody within the company or knows somebody that knows somebody — you know, they will be picked instead of the other one. I think networking is very important in every job. But not only in it. If you want to work at another place or you want to take a career step, it is very important that you know people and that you do some extra networking as well. Yeah.

Secondly, as you are becoming an expert, you need to share your knowledge and not just keep it to yourself. Sharing your expertise with people in your company or even online is very important because you show that you are doing things. You get on the radar of other people and other people. Create a blog or do a podcast or make a YouTube video. Just explain something simple. Get started sharing something you’ve learned, something you worked on, a project.

And the last thing: try to get involved in as many projects as you can. And don’t be shy to do some complex projects. Mostly you will be working in teams, so you will learn from other team members, from other people. Cloud is still very new, so nobody has 20 or 25 years of experience with it, as it happens with other technologies. Everybody is kind of new to the job. It is by doing that you will learn a lot. Making sure you have complex projects in which to get involved. That has worked very well for me in my career.

What would you do if you were not in IT?

That’s a good question. I think I would have a small company that gave mountain biking lessons because I love mountain biking. I imagine this little village in the mountains, where I would have a little shop full of mountain bikes. And I would give lessons, or give some tours. Yeah, that would be nice.

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About us Featured Podcast Interviews

Interview with Wesley Backelant from microsoft: Playing with technology is one thing, but you only start learning when you have requirements (Part 1)

An interview with Microsoft cloud solution architect Wesley Backelant to discuss his career trajectory and the best strategies to gain new skills.

The first part of the interview with Microsoft cloud solution architect Wesley Backelant to discuss his career trajectory and share some tips on how you can gain new skills and become a self-made IT pro like him.

A Microsoft insider, Wesley Backelant is a Belgian cloud solutions architect who works together with the company’s customers to engineer and deploy impactful data and advanced analytics projects. Among other things, Wesley is an expert on the various components of the Azure AI platform. He is also a frequent speaker at numerous community events and regularly shares Azure news and tips.  

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Check out the second part of the interview 

So, Wesley, tell us a bit about your professional trajectory. How did you get started in your career?

I’m actually what they call a self-made man. I started studying ICT or IT, but I had been doing an internship at a company during high school, and that’s the company I got started in. They were looking for someone to help them and support them with software development and, because I worked there as an intern, they asked me to go work with them in my first year of university. They offered to teach me. There were some very senior people working there, who knew everything about development and so on. So, I left my studies and joined the company.

I decided to do that the first year because, to be honest, the education system in Belgium at the moment was not that strong at this level, so I was kind of frustrated. I finished high school and I thought, okay, now I am going to study IT stuff, I am going to learn how to program, and when I got there, there was a lot of stuff that I had to do that was completely unrelated to IT. There was accounting, economics, different languages. It was all super interesting, of course, but I was there to learn how to develop, and even when we did that, it was only old school stuff that we learnt, COBOL, and so on.   

When I got that opportunity to get hands-on, I said, okay, let’s do this. It was a leap of faith too, but it turned out to be okay! A small company, so I was the IT department together with a few colleagues. We did a bit of everything.

Interview with Wesley Backelant from microsoft: What sort of career path eventually took you to become a cloud architect at Microsoft?

Well, sometime after that, I started getting interested in the database side of things, more than on development. I needed bigger challenges, so I got into outsourcing to have more variation, customers and technologies to get in touch with.

Learn more about Microsoft Technologies Careers Overview

I then had the opportunity to become a database architect at a large enterprise in Belgium, and I took it because I knew they were hosting one of the most transaction-intensive SQL environments in Belgium at that moment. I thought it would be a great learning opportunity, which kind of proved to be true, because it put me on the next level of data, focusing on database design, performance tuning, and so on. They were also looking into some business intelligence solutions and, given my passion for data, I had been doing some reporting services work. We implemented together with a colleague the first reporting solution there, and that’s how I got into contact with some people at Microsoft. I figured that, with that experience, it was the right time to apply for a position at Microsoft, as they were looking for a pre-sales for their data and BI.

Back then I was not really a BI specialist, I was more focused on the database engine, but I figured, hey, new stuff to learn, fantastic, let’s take that leap. It was the same year I first saw the demo for what back then was called Red Dog, which is now known as Azure, at an internal event. Looking back, it was hard to imagine. It was the early, early days of Azure, and, seeing that demo, it was still hard to grasp what cloud would mean nowadays.

It was fun being there. Being at the birth of Azure, so to speak, put me in a nice position. I actually grew up and worked together with Azure at Microsoft, meaning that I was blessed to be able to go through this whole cycle of innovation and new services coming up. You know, looking back at something like SQL Server 6.5 and what keeps me awake at night today, it’s really amazing. We are so far from the traditional idea of the database now.

What educational resources do you turn to as someone who is constantly learning new things?

Well, at Microsoft there’s a huge focus on learning these days. It’s one of the key priorities to make sure everyone is up-to-speed with technology. Especially with our roles as cloud architects, we need to be ahead of the curve in many ways. But it’s a broader concept, of course. Everyone at Microsoft needs to at least have some part of technical knowledge, and there’s a strong push for that. Most of that is coming from Microsoft learn these days, which is also open for external people, so I really would encourage people to look at it, as there is great content on the platform.

Additionally, I like to look at blogs, from the official Microsoft blogs to the heroes in the industry. For me that’s actually the queue, when I see something on a blog post, I say, okay, let’s see how can I learn this, how can I get my hands dirty with this.

Is that what you tend to favour, a more practical approach to education?

What I’ve noticed works best for me — I have these “production-like” pet projects. It could be something you do at home, but where you try to have a scenario in mind. Playing with technology is one thing, but you only start to learn when you have requirements, I think.

At first, I had zero knowledge of Linux, for example. I saw it was going to become important. Since I had a server at home running Windows, I decided to make it a Linux server – that was before cloud, to be clear – so I said, okay, let’s use Linux, let’s start building RAID arrays, save some pictures on a central server, etc. I broke the server several times. Luckily, I had backups, thanks to experience. I think I had to re-install it like 3 times because I did something wrong with permissions and partitions in Linux, but that’s learning.

The point is that you need something that has real requirements so that you challenge yourself to try new things. And for me that’s what works best, getting your hands dirty with technology. It, of course, starts by reading and learning the basics. But then you need to start pushing yourself.

Check out more of our interviews from our podcast episodes.

You can follow Wesley on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Also, make sure to check out his blog: My long term memory for data and development related information.

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Growing your career: permanent & freelance IT Consultants

The Value of SAP and SAP S/4HANA Certifications

Why Pursue SAP and SAP S/4HANA Certifications
Why Pursue SAP and SAP S/4HANA Certifications

Why and how should you pursue SAP and SAP S/4HANA certifications?

Denys van Kempen is Technology Expert at SAP focusing on SAP HANA and Analytics. He has been at SAP for more than 10 years, where he helps SAP’s Global Partner Organisation support and educate partners about the company’s technology. Denys is a true SAP advocate, blogging extensively and managing content for the SAP HANA Academy.

Learn more about SAP careers from this SAP project management expert.

How did you get started in your career, what do you do at SAP?

It’s funny that you ask, because, out of curiosity, I recently picked up a starter certification for Azure fundamentals. I just did the exam and was happy to pass. And it was curious, because, when I looked at the transcript where it lists all the certifications that you’ve done in the past, I saw how I had started out in IT almost 25 years, and my first certificate was in Windows 95, doing the networking.

One of the most fun parts of the whole software industry and the whole community around it, is that it is constantly changing, and the only thing required is a willingness to learn. If you are interested in studying, you can work in IT. That’s the main qualification you need, as far as I am concerned.

I am now in my early 50s, I speak to a lot of people, and people have very, very different backgrounds. But I would say that is the most essential qualification. Today we are looking at the cloud platforms, yesterday it was blockchain and then it was big data. The only thing you know is next year it’s going to be something different, and we have to take out our books and study the topic.

Why should SAP experts pursue certifications?

I think there are basically two camps. There are people who enjoy learning new things, who maybe even enjoy the challenge of sitting an exam and hopefully pass. And then there is the group who thinks they have a lot of experience already and don’t really need to answer silly questions. I think there’s value in both arguments.

I’ve seen very good exams. But there are also examples of exams where you have to provide answers to questions nobody would know by heart. The certifications that aim for experience and how you solve things are better examples than just those who ask you to memorise things. And I think most vendors try to get that.

Getting a certification is a great way to make sure you study all the aspects of a certain technology, because typically you work with the most common things, but, if you study the topic, you have an opportunity to learn things that are more obscure, less well-known. For your own benefit, getting certified gives you the confidence that you know the product inside out. It’s a great way to solidify your knowledge.

Are you seeing a particular branch of SAP and SAP S/4HANA certifications that is on the rise these days?

Two years ago, SAP made the strategic decision to go cloud-first in all the development. More recently, that decision was accelerated. Everything is going cloud these days.

I think you have that same effect on certifications. There are not really that many people today who pursue a certification for only on-premise software. It doesn’t matter which vendor, everything is going cloud. That would be my advice: if you learn something new, make sure it runs on the cloud. That’s where the future is.

When it comes to cloud, you can work on software that runs on the cloud, or you can help set up and maintain the infrastructure, the internal plumbing. Would that be a good career move for someone that’s just starting within the cloud ecosystem?  

That’s a good question. SAP systems can be very complex, and you have these very large companies, like big food manufacturers or big banks, whose SAP landscapes are huge. There are a lot of functional people, of course, involved in making sure everything works, but also technical people, doing the networking, the backups, etc. And moving all those landscapes onto the cloud is a major shift of focus.

A question I get from time to time is one from people who have been working as Basis Administrators. They wonder what their role will become with everything going to the cloud. If you’ve been working with backups and things like that, that’s no longer a concern for the customer, because it’s being taken care of by the cloud provider. So, you see that shift.

A lot of the technology is now on the cloud, and no longer on the side of the software vendor. So that would definitely be something to look at. If you have a strong technical interest, you’ll have to study how to work with those cloud providers. Configuration and security, for example, they remain very important, but it’s a different role from the traditional one.

How people make their certification journey easier for themselves?

I would try to stick as close as possible to the information the vendor provides. Most of it is freely available or at a very low cost. The thing is that there are just so many materials out there that you end up going from one rabbit hole to another and lose focus. If you just stick with the course manual, you’ll be able to have a quick preparation for the exam, but if you get side-tracked, you search for exam dumps and study the wrong answers… well, I would certainly not recommend that.

Also, don’t make it a project that lasts too long. It’s either going to be 6 or 8 weeks, but make it something for which you are going to study frequently, even if it’s half an hour every day. Just come half an hour earlier to work and spend that half-hour when you are still fresh working on that. That’s far more reachable than if it’s going to be a 5-month project and every weekend once in a while you try to cram it all in.

How about the books you publish through the SAP Press?

Well, that’s a bit of a different story. For example, if you look at Azure or Google Cloud, they provide a lot of information for free or at a relatively low cost. It’s up on Coursera or EdX, and for 50 euros you can study for a month and that’s all you need. That’s a very reasonable amount of money to invest in your career.

Unfortunately, for some SAP and SAP S/4HANA certifications, you have to go through training, and that training can be quite pricey. If you’re self-employed, you might not have the budget. In those situations, an exam guide might be of help. In addition, the course manuals are written to support the course, so they are always challenging. We write these books specifically to help you pass the exam.

Want to make the most of S/4HANA’s career potential? Check out our comprehensive S/4HANA Careers Guide.

SAP’s Learning Hub, for which you can request a free trial, should be your go-to place for official learning resources and documentation.

You can complement these with SAP PRESS Certification Success Guides, one of which Denys has authored. If it’s motivation you are looking for, he also has a lot to say.

You can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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