This month, let’s play…
“Life is a game,” and in this game, a player’s success and failure come from a combination of different abilities. But there’s something more than just going through life as a single player, it’s about being a part of a team. And we can relate to this on many levels because it doesn’t matter if we speak about personal life or work.
Team players understand that their team’s success is their own success, and they share responsibility when their team experiences difficulties along the way. Teamwork happens when people work together toward a common goal. You can work as a team to move a couch up a flight of stairs, launch a new project, or play football.
You can work as a team by being a Community member as well. Community is a team of all Dynatrace users from all over the world - customers, partners, and employees who play together toward one goal – to make the best of Dynatrace and, in a nutshell – just make life easier for all. 😉
Teamwork in the Community stretches far beyond than mentioned above and affects not only delivering a better product and better service but ending in building cross-company relationships and even friendships.
But why all this football and teamwork-related introduction? It’s because this month, we want you to know one of our Community team players – Joachim Erdei (@Joachim_Erdei) - who by his attitude, confirms everything written above.
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Can you share some details about your past? What is your story, how it happened that you decided to work in the IT / APM area, and how you became a Dynatracer?
I guess I was a typical child who wanted to play all day. My favorites were: football and LEGO bricks. I also read a lot (about everything). My first choice for my future career was a professional football player. Interestingly, I never tried to join a young group of the local football team. I just played a lot. Now I do not feel regret – playing a lot of games as an adult in various kinds of amateur leagues satisfied my dream enough and showed me my limitations.
But there was also another thing. As I wrote, I read a lot. Also, old math schoolbooks which I did for fun. I did not even try to memorize anything, but it still had interesting consequences: I was able to solve any number of math tasks in a strangely short time, giving a headache to math teachers who struggled to find me a task that would be enough time-consuming. (Note: I was not generally very good at school, as I did not like memorizing things, and – as I said – wanted to play football as much as possible. I was just good at math-related things.)
As being good at math leads to a career as a math teacher (as I thought back then), I went into IT studies. Honestly speaking, I do not remember my motivation from that time very well. I surely did not have a clear career path planned. While having some basic knowledge of programming, I associated computers mostly with video games. I learned how to program as late as on studies. It is very easy though – computers do exactly what you tell them.
When I was about to finish MSc studies and looked for a job, a friend of mine recommended Dynatrace, and I stayed here. It’s been almost 13 years since I’ve been working here.
Can you tell us a little bit about your job? What interesting things you’re working on that you can share?
As a software developer in the Log Agent team who serves for small-part-time as a Product Owner and Execution Lead, I share my time between programming and playing with JIRA or Wiki. The most interesting thing is code refactoring. Sometimes I also add new features as a side effect.
The decision to rewrite Log Agent from scratch, which we made some time ago, lead to quite a refreshing job where we may very freely choose and change an approach to application architecture, testing environment, code practices, agile framework, etc. That way, we’re really an autonomous team. 😉
What makes you excited about being a part of the Dynatrace?
I am excited because I have so many interesting tasks waiting to be done, that I am never bored. It is like sprinting a marathon. 🙂 Plus, just doing the good things written above and a wide range of benefits provided by the company really helps.
How is the Community helping you in your job? Why do you think it’s worth being a part of the Dynatrace Community? What best advice can you give someone who just started using Community?
After releasing a big and complex new feature recently, is a very valuable source of information on how to improve our product. Customers often have different points of view and may validate our ideas. And what is good we get positive feedback sometimes too.
Tell us something about you that most people don’t know. What is your biggest joy or passion in life?
I have two daughters. It takes all of my spare time. 😉 
Back in the old days, I played football a lot (I am not retired – just on prolonged paternity leave!). I still try to read, when I have some time (about football, fantasy, sf, philosophy, and history). I sometimes play rapid chess on the Internet when everyone is asleep. I used to play some board games and hope to play again once my daughters are a little older. 😉 Like hiking on not-so-high mountains as well.
I also had some presentations at ALife conferences. You can find me e.g. in proceedings at https://www.dmi.unict.it/ecal2013/ and https://alife.org/conference/alife-14/ More interesting (or at least better-prepared) things are actually waiting for review.😉
What’s one thing on your bucket list? Your dream?
Maybe sleep a little longer? 😉 And I would like to learn Latin. The reason is: I would like to read Lavinia (by Le Guin) having some context. And to get the context, one needs to read Aeneid. I do not want to lose anything in translation. 😉 That said, speaking Latin might be a plus if, at some point I decide to go back in time and attend some chariot race at Circus Maximus. Apart from that, I would like to climb to the top of Olympus. I mean this mountain, literally.
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Joachim, you not only show team spirit, but you go beyond that by demonstrating active cooperation with customers and being aware of their feedback. Lovely to see that these days, in the revenue-driven world, you’re one of the Dynatracers who want to build things that really work for customers.
And we hope that no matter what will be lying ahead, you’ll stay with all of us to play a Community game.
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