We’ve been around for a long time and have collected some of the best minds from across several industries, and we think it’s high time they got their day in the spotlight. In this series of blogs we’ll be unearthing some of the technology and talent that power our hosted communications platform.
For today’s inaugural Tech Talk we’re discussing how to break things and put them back together again before anyone else has to. An often overlooked and even more infrequently appreciated task is that of the service manager turned product tester turned development engineer. Well, maybe that specific role isn’t in itself super common, but despite that, we’ve got a superstar who spends most of his time behind the scenes who fits the bill perfectly- Michael Bom, VirtualPBX DevOps Engineer.
Michael, what is it that you do on a daily basis that most people wouldn’t know about?
Well, that’s probably a pretty big category because from my time as a Support Supervisor, I can tell you there’s a lot about hosted communications that, in general, most people don’t understand. That was always a fun way to help educate users on the technology while walking them through whatever problem they had. But for now, I mostly spend a lot of time migrating existing customers onto the new Dash platform, assisting with porting numbers, an a host of DevOps related stuff.
DevOps related stuff is a broad category, can you expand on that?
Of course! One of the reasons that I got to transition into this role from Support was that I have a knack for tinkering with new products and platforms. So much so, in fact, that I started to get the nod to come in and poke around whenever we had a new technology that we were getting ready to launch. It started out where I just liked to see the limitations of various features and turned into a legitimate effort to just try and break the darn thing!
Breaking things is a valuable skill in your role?
Perhaps not how you think, but absolutely it is! Of course the point wasn’t so much to cause failures as it was to identify anything that may need refining before a product hits the market. Isolating and diagnosing problems and the proper solutions for them is basically what I’ve been doing in tech for years now, so I have a good nose for it.
What other types of support experience do you have?
I’ve been working in this field for years all over Silicon Valley. I’ve spent time obviously in telecom, but I’ve also worked in semiconductors with AMD and I’ve been responsible for potentially life-saving software installs into hospitals with a healthcare technology company in the area as well. So from large scale systems across an entire building or group of buildings all the way down to the individual chips that make the tech world go around, I’ve probably gotten some exposure to it.
That’s awesome! Did you get your start with all of this by taking apart your alarm clock as a kid?
Not really because the alarm clock never interested me enough. Now, my family’s old Commodore 64 and Tandy 286, however, now that was a different story! So yeah, in a sense I’ve always been playing around with the technology in front of me ever since the whole personal computing thing was really becoming a real thing. Which is why I probably enjoy it so much today, too, I suppose.
Michael is just one of a constantly growing team of passionate, devoted, and exceedingly capable engineers who is responsible for keeping the VirtualPBX technology platform on the cutting edge. And so long as he is doing his job to breakdown anything we push out before knuckleheads like me get my hands on it, we’re sure to keep delivering you some of the best, fastest, most reliable and crystal clear hosted telecommunications options around.
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