Meet the Bees: Robert Sandell

In every Meet the Bees blog post, you’ll learn more about a different CloudBees Bee. This time we are in Sweden, visiting Robert Sandell.

Who are you? What is your role at CloudBees?
My name is Robert Sandell, but everyone except for family calls me Bobby. I am a software engineer working on features and bug/security fixes for Jenkins, which means that I get to push code to my favorite OSS project all day, every day.

What makes CloudBees different from other companies?
It is a very distributed company; many, especially in my team, are working from home. In fact, I am the only one in the company working in Scandinavia (although I'm hoping that's not going to be for long) and my closest colleagues, last time I measured, are in Germany, Belgium and England. And that's pretty cool; we get to meet up at various conferences all over the world.

What do you think the future holds for Jenkins?
The future has a tendency to not hold onto much, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey... stuff. ;)
But Jenkins has a good baseline to build on, so stuff is happening all the time, and we even have some big stuff planned in the short term, which is really exciting.

If you weren’t working with Jenkins, what would you be doing?
I would probably still be in the area of software tools development. I enjoy making stuff that makes people's lives easier. Or maybe doing architecture with some big enterprisy stuff, stitching together big systems into even bigger systems to make them do magical things at scale is also quite exciting.

Something we all have in common these days is the constant use of technology. What’s your favorite gadget and why?
I'm a computer guy, so my first thought is my media center PC that I've built myself and configured just the way I want it. I don't think I've watched broadcast television in years. I can choose whatever I want to watch now, instead of waiting for that scheduled time or zapping channels until I find something half-interesting. (Note: No pictures exist of this custom system, even though I know you would all LOVE to see it!)

Vanilla or chocolate or some other flavor, what’s your favorite ice cream flavor and brand?
Häagen-Dazs Strawberries and Cream, even though I'm lactose intolerant I do indulge myself with a tub of it once in a while. :)

But another desserty thing that I find utterly wonderful is an apple or lemon sorbet with a glass of calvados , a cup of coffee and a tiny piece of chocolate for desert.