After leaving Atrápalo, it’s time to jump to a new challenge. As I explained, I need to get out of my confort zone and check other things that will make me learn new things. Some of you already know, but for the rest, the chosen company is Xing. So, I’m more than happy to announce that I’m the next B2B Head of Engineering at @xing. I’d like to share some thoughts about the reasons that took me here.

Back to speak in English

That’s something I was missing. Speak again in English on a daily basis in something really important for me. As you may know, I’m writing a book (and probably more will come). I want to share some knowledge about DDD using videos too and I would like to talk more in international conferences as the Dutch PHP where I’ll talk about “Integrating Bounded Contexts” next June.

German company, international team

eXtreme Programming (XP), Scrum and some tricks of mine worked really well for Emagister and Atrápalo. However, both companies share similarities. Both teams are culturally similar, so one of my interests is checking if this methodologies can work worse or better in a more international environment. They should, but how cultural differences apply to their deployments.

Its main stack is Ruby on Rails (RoR)

I’m interested in the RoR community for different reasons. First of all, big websites developed mainly in the US that I like work with RoR (GitHub, Airbnb, Basecamp and Zendesk). Second, Rails has probably the 95% of the market when building Ruby applications which is something that does not happen with PHP. In PHP, people uses different frameworks in production (Symfony, Laravel, Zend Framework, Cake, Yii, etc.). The PHP community has gone through this process about decoupling from the framework. In RoR stack, the “Rails way” and its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh), has influenced so much the community with controversial approaches: TDD is dead, decoupling, service containers, etc. I want to smell what’s going on inside this community.

Not just RoR (Java, Node, Scala, PHP)

Xing does not deal just with RoR. It also has projects in other different languages such as Java, Node, Scala or PHP. So, we’ll have the change to play with other technologies too.

More complexity (60 applications)

More applications means in general more complexity. Let’s see if in an environment where 60 applications are passing information to others in sync and asynchronous ways, my background with Domain-Driven Design (DDD) can help or I can improve my skills in such scenario.

Great people

I’ve met the global CTO, the VP of Engineering, tons of people in the Barcelona office and I can just say they are great. They know they have tons of challenges and opportunities in order to get better and they have asked me to help them. Of course, I’m not going to leave the PHP community, it’s in its golden era. And probably we’ll organise at Xing offices some interesting tech meet-ups.

See you soon!

• new challenge
• ror
• ruby on rails
• xing