Engineering Spotlight — Robin de Graaf
Robin is one of our senior Back-end Engineers. He has seen Mollie grow and mature since he joined in 2016. What’s it like to work as a Back-End Engineer at Mollie? I had the chance to sit down for a cup of strong coffee with Robin and talk about how his journey at Mollie started and what he’s working on right now.
So who the heck are you anyway? (aka The Who)
Hi! I’m Robin! I studied English Language and Culture, and as is obvious by now, did not end up doing that as a career. I still write fiction, however, but mostly as a very serious hobby. I actually started as a developer because I needed a thing but couldn’t find such a thing, so I built that thing. And from there it just turned from hobby to career about 10 years ago.
My expertise is low-level architectural stuff and finding unexpected solutions to weird problems. Code and stories, they’re both a form of writing in the end, and I find that my creative side complements my logical, pattern-finding side very well.
Since I come from a background where I had no official education for development, I find it very important to help others as much as possible, since I myself would not have gotten to where I am now without people taking time out of their day and helping me grow and learn.
In that way I’m trying to be a positive addition to a group of people (everyone here at Mollie) who are trying their best to be there for each other, work towards the same goal together (being the best PSP in Europe) and making sure the product keeps improving.
From the company side, it’s much the same thing, where they motivate and support everyone to grow both personally and professionally.
Choosing Mollie (aka The Why)
I joined Mollie in 2016, at the time of writing 3,5 years ago. There were about 40 people running around here at the time. Now that we’ve grown to over 150, it’s nice to see that most of those 40 are actually still around.
At the time I was looking for a company where the product was at a bigger scale than the things I’d worked on before, a company that was growing and where everybody genuinely cared about the product they were working on. I wanted to be part of a team where everybody had equal input and would spar about the best solution to a given problem, regardless of how things had been done in the past.
After the first 2 interviews I was pretty sure that’s what I was looking at with Mollie, and after a few months of getting used to how things were done and why, I started to find out that I had made the right choice.
3,5 years can go by so very quickly when you’re having fun building something awesome with the right people.
What awesome thing my team is building (aka The What)
We’ve been working on a project which will replace the inner workings of our Mollie payment platform, and will unlock both more scalability for our existing products, but also new and exciting products that will help our customers grow and enjoy using Mollie even more. To do so, we’ve used some of the same technologies and design philosophies we’ve used throughout the years, but also new ones.
It was my first time working at scale with a RabbitMQ setup, as well as designing a microservice from the ground up. We’ve had to approach challenges in different ways and some of the new discoveries we’ve made for this microservice have already found their way back into our main platform as well.
It was a big and somewhat intimidating project, but all major changes are, and perhaps they should be. This wasn’t a change to be made lightly, but we do already have test customers running on it, and we’re constantly working on moving more onto it.
And now what? (aka The I Ran out of W-words)
I’m not going anywhere. 3,5 years and there’s still so many challenges and new projects to tackle, ways in which I can grow as a developer or perhaps even in a different direction.
I’ll get back to you when it’s been 7 years 😄
