Engineering spotlight: Frank de Jonge
‘After only six months I got a crucial role in shaping the technical direction of this company, that’s extraordinary’
When Frank de Jonge came to Mollie for an interview, we were actually nervous to meet him. As a software developer, Frank had already quite a reputation and he could literally cherry-pick his next step. So what was it that attracted him to Mollie? Read on and find out more about his road to Mollie, his impact on our engineering framework, and also: what makes Frank extremely nervous?
Taking the step: why Mollie?
Like a proper engineer, Frank sums up a list of criteria when we ask him how he made his choice for Mollie. Frank mainly worked as a freelancer, but last year he went searching for employment. ‘I was in it for the long run; I wanted to focus on 1 product with a solid proposition for a longer period of time’, he says. ‘It was clear to me that I wanted to work at a place where the money they make is directly affected by the engineering. I was also searching for interesting engineering challenges, for which the world of finance is particularly suitable; it’s at the intersection of high throughput and accuracy. You see: we need to process a lot of payments, and everything needs to be exactly right.’ You can just see his face lighting up when he talks about these challenges.
So Frank’s first filters were met by Mollie. But there were still other options left. What really made the difference in the end, were the people. ‘From the outside, Mollie looked great. But that can only be appearances, right? So I talked to a lot of Mollies, to assess: who are the people that work here and how does Mollie treat their people? I found a connection there, that was a very important part of my choice.’
PHP celebrity
So what is it that Frank did, to become famous as a developer? ‘Well, I’ve been very lucky with the exposure I got through the PHP community’, he says. ‘You could say that the PHP community gave me the career that I have today. When I started learning to write PHP, I got in contact with an open-source framework. The maintainers of that framework got tired merging my pull requests and threw me the keys to the castle. So then I was on the core team!’
‘After maintaining that framework for a while, I wrote other PHP packages. One of which became especially successful: Flysystem, which is now the most downloaded file system abstraction tool worldwide. It has over 100 million downloads. Not in my wildest dreams, I thought I would ever create something this popular.’
Immediate impact on Mollie
Frank started out as a lead for one of the payment teams, but six months later, his role changed quite a bit. ‘Yeah, as a team lead it was my challenge to enable the team to deliver better and faster. That was kind of a mentoring challenge for me, which was very interesting’, he says.
So what changed? ‘Well, that was both my low point and my high point of working at Mollie. After a few months, I began to see a high need for architectural changes. I spotted it and thought ‘why is nobody seeing this?!’
‘It turned out to be a matter of communication: I addressed the matter and I got the support to do something about it. So after six months, I got a crucial role in shaping the technical direction of this company. And judging by the number of suggestions that were accepted by the company, even though they were quite big and impactful… from someone that has just joined, that’s extraordinary!
Engineering challenges: nail it & scale it
So partly because of Frank, Mollie’s architecture is changing. And that comes with its own challenges. ‘In Engineering, you can solve the same problem in 1000 ways, but which way is right for you? That depends on the context as well as the problem. We have to come up with a solution with the right balance, which is very interesting technically, but also from a people’s perspective. If you’re going to change something in an architecture, a lot of parts need to change along with it. When parts change, developers need to change. How do you accommodate that? How do you get people excited for it and set up for success?’
Frank thinks the biggest challenge for the coming year is to nail that process and then scale for growth. ‘We’re taking measures to proactively allow the growth of the company, and the tech side needs to grow as well. When an organisation is growing, the way the different organisational parts relate to each other is shifting continuously. We’re making sure that tech stays top of mind during this process.’
Stage Banter
So Frank is an ambitious and analytically strong software architect, but that is of course not all he is. We always ask a personal question as well, to find out more about the person behind the job title. Who would have thought Frank has stage fright? Not us!
‘People know me as a speaker, but that’s one of the most terrifying things for me. As soon as the crowd is more than ten people, I have immense stage fright. I am a drummer in a Punk/Rock Band as well (Stage Banter — ‘We’re on Spotify, so we’re a legit band, right?’) and those bands don’t play big shows haha. But even for those shows, I always get really nervous.’
