PEOPLE Meet Marcel, Tech Lead for Panels

Who are you and how did you come to ABOUT YOU?

My name is Marcel and I am 35 years old. Originally I was a front-end developer. My previous employer went bankrupt and I heard about ABOUT YOU by chance through my mother. She was worried that I was starting a job at the wrong company and had only heard good things about ABOUT YOU. At the trial work day in the "Purchasing Interface Team" of Gina Nuguid, I already got along great with the team and felt comfortable. One month later I already signed the contract. After a few years, I got the chance to help build the SCAYLE Commerce Engine from the beginning and am now Tech Lead of the Control Panel.

What does a "Tech Lead - Panels" do?

At ABOUT YOU, I'm technically responsible for the frontend and the APIs needed for it in our SCAYLE Commerce Engine - everything the user sees out front. Our suite, which we also use for aboutyou.com, is built on Laravel and Vue JS and we try to use as many useful, modern technologies as possible. Keeping up to date with my team is also one of my responsibilities. As Tech Lead I have two teams under me, which I manage disciplinarily and technically. Unfortunately, this means that I don't have as much time to program myself. I share my role with Benjamin Neske, who takes over the product view for our area. 

What have been your best moments at ABOUT YOU?

My best moment by far is meeting my wife at an ABOUT YOU Christmas party. We are now married and have a little son. In retrospect, it was simply incredible. Then there was the moment when we went live with the Commerce Suite after several years of development together. An extremely important project, into which a lot of heart and soul went and which today forms the foundation of our e-commerce stack at ABOUT YOU - I'm a bit proud of that. Then there were the nice hackathons, the code talks and many spectacular employee parties that I remember fondly.

Which technologies & tools would you definitely not want to do without at ABOUT YOU?

Everything that has to do with modern infrastructure tools. For me as a Tech Lead, analysis tools are very important - e.g. Datadog, Kibana and Sentry. Just to see as early as possible where something hangs or could hang, find bottlenecks & debug bugs. Furthermore, I feel comfortable in all Atlassian products like JIRA and Confluence and also take a look at Gitlab as our central code repository.

What do you do to balance your job?

Since our son is now only 8 months old, there is not much time for my hobbies - except Duplo building with my son ;) If I do get away in between, I mainly go mountain biking in the Harburg mountains or go for a run. With the mountain bike, I have also participated in a 24-hour race and pushed myself to my limits.

Marcel is actively recruiting for his team! Apply now to one of the many open positions on our Jobs page!