- Name: Angel Ivanov
- Job title: Software Engineer
- Years at VMware: 6 months as an intern, 4 years and 6 months as a full-time employee
- First job: An internship at VMware
- Fun fact: Recently, I have discovered photography – a new hobby I am very passionate about. I love traveling and taking photos and also coming up with concepts for creative photography.
- Favorite social distancing activity: The social distancing period was not hard or annoying for me. I like playing video games, so the time of self-isolation was passing quickly for me.
You started your career as an intern at VMware. What were the biggest benefits of the VMware internship program for you?
As an intern, my main goal was to gather as much experience as possible for the 6 months internship. For this to happen you need to be around skilled mentors and engineers. I had the opportunity to have such a great mentor. I’ve learned so many things from him which are helpful even in my current day-to-day work. Another huge benefit of the VMware internship program was that I was working on the functionality of a real product, built with cutting-edge technologies. I had the chance to explore these technologies, so when I started working full-time in the company it was much easier.
Tell us more about the work you do at the Cloud Management BU team at VMware?
I am currently working on a product that provides a lot of tools and functionality for our customers to manage and automate their public or private cloud infrastructures. I am working on a service that allows great customization for every customer’s use case. This is because different customers require different ways to extend their workflows and our service provides precisely this ability. The service leverages the power of FaaS(Function as a Service). The customers can customize their workflows by writing their own scripts triggered by different system events. If the customer uses public cloud providers like AWS or Azure, these scripts run on AWS Lambda or Azure Functions. For the customers using vSphere, we have developed our own FaaS engine based on Docker and Kubernetes.
What’s one favorite thing about your job?
One of my favorite things in my job is the challenge. First, the challenge to have stability and resiliency in such a big product. The challenge to optimize the product to run thousands of customer’s workflows, and of course, the challenge to provide good software used by other big-name companies.
What’s one favorite thing about working at VMware?
My favorite thing about working at VMware is the people I am surrounded with. My teammates, my manager, and the layers above. Everybody is a real professional with a great attitude. The people respect each other, and they are always willing to help and cooperate. I’ve never met any different person, and I guess this is just the company’s culture.
You started as a VMware intern, and today, you’re a mentor of the interns in your team. What are the benefits of being a mentor?
Being a mentor is a great experience, beneficial both for the mentor and the interns. To be a mentor you need to come up with an idea for the internship project. Once the idea is approved, an intern is being hired. I want to mention here that the people in the company responsible to hire interns are doing really good job, and the mentors are also being part of the hiring process in order to find the best person for the project. Usually, the intern projects are innovative functionalities for the main projects, and this is the main benefit of being a mentor. Basically, as a mentor, you work on your cool idea with the help of an intern.
