In this week’s Meet the Developer we are meeting with Iain Wood, a senior software developer from the UK, actually, he does more than just development!
Introduce yourself.
My name is Iain. I am a software developer for Flexiana, living in Vietnam.
What do you like the most about your job?
What I most like is the constant stream of puzzles to be solved. I tend to look for puzzles to solve anyway, puzzles to be solved and things to be learned.
What was your thought the first time you heard about Flexiana?
Let me give you some background. I worked for years with computers, as a sysadmin, developer, and test engineer. Eventually, I got sick of the rat race. So I moved to Vietnam for another adventure, but that’s a whole different story. I ended up as a dive photographer. Being a dive photographer you have to quickly and efficiently process and package photos to deliver to customers. I had already discovered Clojure through music, and I figured this was the ideal language to help me out. So I built up a whole system for the photo business using Clojure. In the end, it turned out I was just spending more time writing Clojure and playing with Clojure than I was actually doing photography and I was really enjoying it.
Just out of the blue, from one of the Clojure communities, there was a message from Flexiana offering chances of remote work programming in Clojure. At that time it made me start thinking “maybe this is something that I should be doing!”
So I sent off a message and then kind of forgot about it. This was back in the early days of Flexiana and it was a little while before I got a response. When I did get responses, it was a really quite intriguing programming challenge,
So I guess my initial feeling was “This could be a start of a new chapter!”.
How long have you been working at Flexiana?
I can’t remember exactly. it’s at least 4 years, as I have notes that go back to 2018 mentioning Flexiana. I can’t tell you exactly.
What does your average day look like?
Well, average really doesn’t come into it. I do something else in the mornings, some 17th-18th century style woodworking. And after a nap, I start work and work through the afternoon and evening until night. This works well with the time zone differences and my night owl tendencies.
What excites you the most about working at Flexiana?
It’s the politics (with a small p, nothing to do with party politics). It’s about attitude and structure. The structure of Flexiana is very flat. There is no hierarchy of bosses and subordinates. It’s like functional anarchy. And I do mean functional.
It works incredibly well, where people feel like they can contribute whatever they feel they are good at. It’s not like “your opinion doesn’t matter!” it’s the ability to share information, the ability to use what you know, and the ability to express yourself so well. It’s just freely available here. Yes, I have worked in other companies with good cultures, but nothing quite compares to Flexiana’s.
How would you describe working at Flexiana in a word?
I can’t describe working with Flexiana in one word.
Would you recommend people working at Flexiana?
Yes of course I would. But it’s a small target that we have here. Most of the people I know who might be interested are already working in something they love to do or are already members of Flexiana.
Any last words?
No that’s it!
