Intergironaut Story: Mateusz

“I realised that our principles are clear points that we truly aim to follow. There is a vision for how the company should work and it informs how people work” 

Mateusz is a software developer, who enjoys Intergiro’s dynamic and flexible environment and has been able to develop himself in his original fields of interest.  

How would you describe your role? 

I am a software developer. Officially I’m a full stack developer, but I mostly focus on backend - I would say my role is 98% backend. I’m primarily working with a payment orchestration service, which, as the name suggests, is for orchestrating the payment creation process. This is the idea that we’re trying to go towards, creating a repository that decides what exactly is created within the system. And it will hold all logic on our side.  

Let’s run through what an ‘average’ day at work looks like for you. 

Well, let’s start with that I’m mostly a night person. I prefer to work in the evenings. I try to configure my day so that I don't start before 10, as I’m not very productive in the mornings. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always been this way. Sometimes I work nights, I’ll even work until 2am! People might say it’s unhealthy, but I just have a better focus. My kids are sleeping, there’s no rush on Slack, there’s silence, so I can focus on heavy work. Nighttime is a good time to focus on the hardest tasks. 

Otherwise, I like that every day is a little different. Today I woke up early and had some coffee and started to work, while yesterday I started around 14:00 and worked until very late. It differs depending on my daily duties and tasks. Before I was trying to fit everything into specific time slots, but now I’m focusing more on the best value for time and not excluding anything about my life. My goal for this year is to worry less about working specific hours and instead focus more on the ‘flow’, keeping more work-life balance and a symbiosis and connection between my personal and professional worlds. I don’t force myself to work if I’m not feeling the flow, but once I’m in that flow I can focus on things and resolve everything much faster. 

Working remotely, how does communication with your team work? 

I have daily communication with my direct team. After all, we’re only two on this team! We’re two devs working on one specific project, although we’re part of a larger team as well. I think with the larger group, the communication is less frequent, as we simply have fewer common topics to sync on. 

We have syncs every couple of weeks, but we do communicate with our team leaders and others who are involved in the infrastructure. We don’t have too many calls but we have constant asynchronous communication, which I think is good, because that allows me to plan my day as I want and connect the parts of my life. This is a big change that only came to the larger team recently. We used to have a call every day at 10 in the morning, which meant that every day I had to plan around this meeting. Now, we only have two updates during the week, which makes it easier to plan your week as it’s only two regular meetings. And then I also join any other meetings that come up of course. It’s easier for me to be agile when I don’t have the pressure of a daily meeting. 

This is a big change, that we’re mostly communicating asynchronously on Slack. It’s worked well for the whole team.

How would you describe your best day here?  

This is a tricky question! I would say that there haven’t been any big extremes. In the 365 days I’ve had at Intergiro, most have been great and I have really enjoyed being here. It’s hard to pinpoint one day that has been extraordinary. All the days have been fine, they’ve all been good, some better of course, but no particular 1 or 10 that are out of the scale. 

You know, I work with a great team, within a great company with a good approach to people, and that’s something that I really looked for, a really ‘human’ company - where we live, and work, and have fun, and build a work-life balance in a way that is beneficial for both sides. And I feel all of that is achievable at Intergiro.

What are your favourite aspects of your role? Of working for Intergiro?

For me, it’s mainly been being able to work with microservice architecture,  because this is something that I really wanted to dive into. I’ve read a lot about it, about distributed systems, and I’m really learning a lot from the people around me. We have really tough problems to solve sometimes, which is good. This is very challenging, to the point that sometimes I find myself in the shower daydreaming about solutions! It’s something I really like to do. 

I have to say, I’ve never had a day that I was bored at Intergiro. Every day has been a new challenge where I’ve just learned more and more, and I push myself to reach the bar that is set.   

My other favourite aspect has to be the openness of the company. It’s usually a joke that companies call themselves a ‘family’ - like we’re working for money, it’s just a company, right? But there is something in it for Intergiro. It’s a great bunch of people who have a similar view for life and for what they are doing.

I also really like the clarity of our principles, that was something that surprised me the most. Since I first joined, I realised that our principles are clear points that we want to follow. There is a vision for how the company should work and it informs how people work. 

How has your career developed since joining Intergiro? 

My last 12 years were in frontend architecture, but I was rather exhausted of it. It’s a very dynamic and complex environment, and I find backend development to be a bit more straightforward. I think the ‘heaviness’ of the work is more in solving problems, keeping everything intact and making it work, but there’s not so many side effects that happen around your work itself. 

In this role, I’ve been able to develop my backend skills. I have had to go through everything again because I was kind of rusty, but now I think I like it better as it’s more directly focused on resolving business problems. 

So that’s been the greatest improvement in my career since joining Intergiro: I’ve gone back to my origins and really developed myself. There’s a long road ahead of course, but with so many great people around, there’s always someone to learn from.