Meet the Bees: Valentina Armenise

At CloudBees, we have a lot of seriously talented developers. They work hard behind the scenes to keep the CloudBees Platform as a Service (PaaS) and our on-premise Jenkins solutions up-to-date with all the latest and greatest technologies, gizmos and overall stuff that makes it easy for you to develop amazing software.

Valentina left her home town Lecce in the south of Italy when she was 18 to study Management Engineering at Poliecnico di Torino in the north of Italy. In her first few years there, she found an interest in software developing and programming languages.

In 2010, Valentina started an Erasmus program in Stockholm at KTH University where she studied robotics and artificial intelligence. There, she wrote her master thesis on C++, which was aimed at the pose-estimation of an object in a scene captured by the kinect camera (which is the depth sensor by Microsoft widely known to be used in the XBOX360) 

After graduation she worked for two years as a java developer at an IT company in Rome. There she coded the server part of mobile apps (ANDROID and iOS) and got experience with resful web-services (json-xml), relational databases, HTML, CSS, SQL and other technologies useful to the server side of applications. She joined CloudBees in September of 2013.

Who are you? What is your role at CloudBees?
I am Valentina, and I am a developer advocate at CloudBees. Everyone calls us "sherpas." For those who do not know what a "sherpa" is, I did not know either when I joined the team! The word sherpa refers to an ethnic group of people living in Nepal who are regarded as elite mountaineers and experts in their local terrain.

We help users to use the platform, climbing the mountain of obstacles with them side by side.

We take a users by the hand as soon as they make their first step on the platform and lead them to be successful. That's why we are also called Developer Success Engineers.

What does a typical day look like for you? What are CloudBees customers like?
I usually wake up between 7:00 and 8:30 and get to work between 8:00 and 9:30. It depends on how tired I feel. :)

Since it is really cold here during the winter (sorry, I am Italian...you cannot blame me!) I usually hate the trip from home to work, and can't wait to be in the office in front of my computer.

I check email, twitter, stackoverflow, and I see if there is something urgent to deal with. I take a tea and then I start answering emails from users who need help, which usually takes up my whole morning. Some of them are easy and fast and some require investigation and time. That's why I don't really have a routine, and that is what I like about this job.