With over 20 years experience in his field. Valerio talks about his fascination for security. He shares with us why his approach of working smarter not harder, is the way forward. Always embracing new challenges, more is never enough, as Valerio continues to grow his knowledge and share this with those around him.
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Valerio Mulas: I am originally from Sardinia, an island in Italy. I moved to The Netherlands almost 4 years ago to work for Mobiquity. Before moving I lived and worked in Sardinia and Italy in many different areas, but to sum it up; security, network security and system administration. This is my core background.
What interests me? Security, devops and archeology! I love everything to do with security and devops. This has been my passion since I was young, it has always been within me. Since the age of 4, I have been typing commands on my first computer. This passion developed into a curiosity where I loved breaking things as I wanted to see what was behind the fence. I started to realise that security, the knowledge of security, was the weapon that allowed me to get across that fence. Most of the time I would then find myself in trouble, but I enjoyed it.
I also have a great love for archaeology. Sardinia has a lot of archaeological sites, one of the highest number of sites in the world. Growing up with all this history around me I was interested to learn more about it and discover new sites. Anytime I have the opportunity to go back, I like to hop in the car and discover a new site. There are many sites that are not even mapped out or fully uncovered yet.
I have always been interested in security. But there came a point when I realised that if I want to work at scale, knowledge of security was not enough and I needed to study something else. This is when I started to learn more about devops. The devops mentality is all about working as efficiently as possible. This fits exactly with my own mindset: work less, work smarter!
If you can build something the right way once, why reinvent the wheel? This approach facilitates more automation, allowing you to create things that you can use immediately without having to spend much effort. You can start to build a business model on top of this. This got me thinking why not have a devops blueprint that is tested, shared and known across the company. Using this business model based on shared stakeholders within the company itself, will allow for faster delivery of high quality services and products. Currently this is something I am working towards with another colleague. I'm excited to see where this will lead us.
I decided to move to The Netherlands as I wanted a change. From June to October it can get unbearably hot in Sardinia so I actually enjoy the weather here, even the cold weather and snow. I choose Amsterdam because I really like the city and the buildings. It has a great central location so it is ideal for travelling and not too far away when I want to fly back to Sardinia. Of course there are things I miss from my home country, in particular the food, everything tastes better from home, but I enjoy the life I have created for myself here.
Why did I choose Mobiquity? Because they were using the right tools for the job in the proper way and not afraid to try something new. I find that back home, companies tend to like to stay within their comfort zones and shy away from taking any kind of risk. I was eager for a challenge. I wanted to work for a company who was not afraid to be one of the first to take on new challenges. Mobiquity does this!
I am a technical architect. I help customers design infrastructure that is secure and reliable. My role covers infrastructure, architecture and security because they are all part of the same process. You must focus on how everything will work together and not just look at one aspect at a time, so it is critical that you have a broad knowledge and understanding.
I enjoy my work. I like building and developing strong relationships with clients. When we can reach the point where I become a trusted partner and they value the input and experience I share, that's what I enjoy the most about my role. It is very important to build this connection so that the customer will listen and hear the advice and guidance you are providing. Especially when there are certain things where you cannot allow a lot of variation or changes because making a domain means you must follow a set of guidelines. It can sometimes be quite time consuming to have similar discussions and continuously explain to customers why I must do things in certain ways or why there is not an option for many changes or tweaks. But once you can break that wall, gain their trust and start having very open discussions; this is what it is all about for me.
I have worked on many interesting projects. One project that comes to mind is a customer I have been working with for 2 to 3 years now. It was an interesting scenario as the devops team there was entirely composed of black belts but really a great project. We created a lot of things that we are using nowadays in Mobiquity because what we had made was usable and reliable. I have learned a lot from this project and it proves my idea of DevOps blueprints can work. The product that we created during this project is helping Mobiquity today, to create the foundation of what I think Mobiquity should be tomorrow.
I enjoy working at Mobiquity because I am surrounded with passionate and curious people. We have a great culture of taking care of people in the way that we should. I get to work on challenging and engaging projects. I like that Mobiquity embraces idea generation and offers us the time and tools to see if a concept, or idea actually works. I'm excited to work further on my devops blueprint and see if we can succeed. It will be a challenge and will require a lot of change, but I am not afraid of this, I embrace it
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