With more than five million weekly visits and 300 bids per second during peak traffic, the demands on our technical solutions are high. Meet Karl, one of the developers who handle this challenge. Karl is a developer and team lead for the backend team and he will talk us through what the life of a Tradera developer looks like. 

Karl, how is it to work at Tradera?
One of the best things about working at Tradera is the many types of problems to solve, many of which are interesting and challenging. We are building large distributed and scalable systems that handle great amounts of data. This comes with a set of challenges that I love to dig into, especially when we solve these kinds of problems together, as a team. When we work together, it’s like no project is too hard to solve. I really think that my colleagues are the best. We always have fun together and even though we are working from home right now, we always make sure to see each other on a daily basis over video-syncs.

What project do you work on right now?
Right now we're working on an internal tool that is used for manipulating the category tree as well as metadata for categories and auctions. It also involves frontend which is a bit unusual - but fun - for the backend team. If someone wants to buy for example a dress, you have the category “clothes”, the subcategory “women’s clothing” and then “dresses”. But if you are looking for something more specific, like a red dress, you need to use free text. What we are working on is to add metadata which will give the user the possibility of filtering on colors when searching for something specific. We have been working on this project for a while and it is starting to pay off which is really exciting.

How does a typical workday in your life look like?
I usually start my day somewhere between 7-8 in the morning. Either with some coding task, a release or reviewing some of my colleague’s code from the day before. I think it's nice to have some focused time just for myself in the morning to prepare for the day. At 9.30 it’s time for stand-up and after that meeting I usually meet with the Product Owner or other teams. 

After lunch it’s time for another stand-up. This time it’s more of a sync, to catch up now when everybody is working from home. I think it’s important to socialize during the day and sometimes we are also pair-programming. I like when the whole team comes forward with the backlog, it is always a great feeling. The high speed we are having in the team and the great attitude when it comes to problem-solving are some of the many things I appreciate here at Tradera.

I’m lucky to work with my hobby, I like to code a bit in the evening as well. As I have two kids it’s full speed picking up from school and leaving for different activities. The whole family is practicing karate, so some evenings are also spent doing that.

Would you like to be part of the development team at Tradera? You find our open positions here.

Are you curious to get to know us at Tradera better? Visit our career page here and follow us on LinkedIn here.

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