Today, let’s meet Guilherme, a member of our multicultural and international team and our DevOps Engineer. He joined XWiki a year ago and when he’s not working for the Infrastructure team, he enjoys spending time outdoors or keeping up with his passion for technology. We’re glad to have Guilherme as part of our team and through his stories, to get to learn more about Brazil, his home country.
- Favorite artist: Eric Clapton
- Best book ever read: "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
- Dream destination: Patagonia (Mount Fitz Roy)
- Quote you live by: "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." Carl Sagan
- At the office or remote? Remote
Tell us about yourself
I'm Guilherme, I'm 33 years old and I'm from Brazil. I have been serving as a DevOps Engineer on the Infra team at XWiki for a year. Outside of work, I like to spend my time outdoors, hiking or climbing. And when I'm at home, I love keeping up with news about technology, economy, and general curiosities.
The journey to XWiki
What were you doing before XWiki? Did you change careers when joining our team?
Before joining XWiki I was working for a Brazilian service company that had an application platform where the main product was an app for the civil construction area. I got to know XWiki while working at this company. Here, around 2015 we started using XWiki as an internal solution for a knowledge base for the development team and over time it started to be used in some other areas. But it was only after some years, during the first months of a specialization course in Cloud Computing, that the opportunity to be part of the team appeared.
What is it like to be working in the Infra team at XWiki?
Challenging and rewarding at the same time. As it is an extremely customizable solution, dealing with different clients with different levels of customization and different characteristics is even more of a challenge. However, work becomes much easier and more agile because it has the support of many extremely competent and dedicated colleagues.
Open source impressions
Was open source something you had an interest in prior to XWiki?
My first contact with open source was through a schoolmate when we exchanged floppy disks for a Brazilian operating system called Kurumin, a distro-based Debian and Knoppix. It was thanks to that first contact that an opportunity arose for a course that became my first job as an intern at a company in the city of Blumenau, in mid-2005. Even when working with systems with proprietary and closed source code, I always maintained a balance between the use of proprietary and open-source systems or even tried to prioritize the use of open-source.
What's the open-source value you identify with most?
The power of the community, considering that being able to improve and build bigger and better things is possible thanks to the work shared by the open-source community.
Being an XWikier
How was the integration process at XWiki for you?
It was very well handled, especially since I was changing the way I worked a lot, going from a hybrid model to a completely remote one, because the entire XWiki team is far away. However, my colleagues have been patient enough and helped me deal with so many changes in the beginning, such as a new way of working, other languages, and overcoming my insecurities. But I could say that the integration process reached its peak during the annual seminar. This is when I had the chance to really meet my co-workers and have a good time with them.
Guilherme with the XWiki and CryptPad team during the company's 2023 Seminar
What were the biggest ways in which XWiki changed during the time you've been around?
I believe that the biggest change was the increase in the number of large projects we undertook and in the number of new people that joined the company. I couldn't help but notice the dedication and effort of the tenured team members in balancing mentoring new joiners with delivering high amounts of work.
What would you say is the most valuable lesson you learned during your time at XWiki?
I can always learn a lot from my co-workers, whether they are younger or older than me.
And unlike other types of private organizations that sometimes encourage different teams to compete with each other, at XWiki all teams play the same game, which in the end allows you to count on everyone.
What has kept you at XWiki so far?
I still have a lot to learn and absorb from the knowledge and experience of my colleagues, and I still feel that I have a lot to contribute to improving our day-to-day work both as an XWikier and as a member of our open-source community.
If you could describe XWiki in one word, what would it be?
Dream Team!
Favorite memory up until now at XWiki?
It was certainly my first trip abroad when I visited the office in Paris. I left a small town in South America that I thought was mid-sized to cross the ocean in a journey of many hours and finally arrived in a giant, yet beautiful city, that is rich in culture and history. Having met the colleagues personally and shared many experiences with them was certainly remarkable. Also, all the seminar sessions are very much engraved in my memory. It was a great opportunity to meet and see colleagues after so long and have a good time exchanging experiences, as well as spending time working together in a completely new and different place.
