In the summer of 2018 I was offered a position at Bisnode that was too good to turn down. In fact, the description of the role read pretty much exactly like the role I had talked to my manager about being my dream role a couple of years before that when leaving Bisnode to try my luck working in the security space building an identity server on standards such as OAuth2 and OpenID Connect for Curity. Having already worked for Bisnode I knew and liked the company and many of the people in the tech organization, so I knew it was a good fit for me. Simply moving back to something that I felt pretty much done with however wasn’t too appealing. So back to the role then.

Bisnode historically had worked more or less like a big company with independent entities in many European countries with little or no coordination between the units. This worked well for creating products and offerings tailor made for local markets, but obviously made less sense for competing on an increasingly international market. So a few years back Bisnode changed direction towards a model named “One Bisnode” which tried to address this by developing a series of products that would work across borders and markets. From a tech perspective this meant not just merging products and platforms but also that development teams scattered across thirteen countries - all used to working more or less in isolation - now had to work together. Having someone from outside of the teams with both development experience and at least some degree of social skills would surely be useful in that coordination effort. That’s how the role of developer advocate came to be, and I started working in August the same year.

As pretty much all development teams worked in or at least aimed to work on the new platform Bisnode was building, it made sense that I’d be a part of the platform team. While I wasn’t initially that interested in the infrastructure side of things, the enthusiasm and skills of the team quickly had me engaged in various infra, ops and devops issues whenever I got some time outside of my responsibilities as a developer advocate. This paid off immediately not just for my own enjoyment but just as much when getting new teams on-boarded to the platform. Unsurprisingly people tend to listen to someone who knows what they’re talking about, and occasionally I do. That fall I went on a tour through Europe to meet as many Bisnode developers that I possibly could. To learn who they were and what they were working on to some extent, but just as much to talk about and demonstrate the new common systems, platforms and tools. I loved every second. Talking to smart people about code, tech, design, methodologies and whatnot - all things I do whenever I get a chance, and here I was having someone actually pay me to do this? Spending days in front of a whiteboard leading presentations and workshops, often with discussions that continued long into the evening at some local restaurant or bar. Good times!

One of the trips I made wasn’t to one of our offices but to Barcelona together with my platform team. In a huge conference center we spent almost a week listening to some of the brightest (and as is commonly the case, some of the not as bright) minds in the kubernetes community talk about their projects, products and ideas. Some of the talks we attended were about a policy engine one could plug into kubernetes to put guard rails around ones resources - things like “if this application being deployed has too many replicas it will be too expensive and should thus be denied”. Not super interesting to me at the time, but the idea of having policies separate from application code to govern access control and being used as the basis for other types of enforcement - this brought me back to a lot of the problems I faced and ultimately left unsolved when working on the identity side of things. Like, I’ve built all these things to prove who someone is - now what do we do with that information? That’s exactly where Open Policy Agent (OPA) entered the room. Using OPA and its policy language Rego there was finally a way to make use of the identity to make informed decisions in all of these distributed systems, and it didn’t take long before OPA was “everywhere” at Bisnode - mainly because we just had so much fun implementing it in some product or domain that once we were done we just kept on going. Several developers and teams joined in and soon after OPA was officially adopted as the way to work with authorization and other types of policy within the Bisnode tech organization.

Having many of my plans and ambitions around advocacy cancelled due to the ongoing pandemic was disappointing, but cutting down on some of the social activities also meant that I got to direct more focus to.. well, tech. This past year I have tried to spend about half the time contributing to the platform team’s projects and the rest of the time focused on getting OPA out into the hands of our development teams and hopefully have them experience the same joy working with this piece of technology as I have myself. To help me out in this effort a team from Warsaw have acted as my closest allies since the start of the year, and I’m truly proud of what we’ve accomplished together. Not only have we introduced OPA to Bisnode, but we have tried our best to just as much be an active member of the OPA open source community with all that entails - contributing code, participating in meetups and online forums, advocating OPA in public channels, and so on. Working like this was new to all of us, and we’ve learnt more than I could ever try and summarize here, but most of all we’ve just had so much fun. Having worked in the OPA community for this long also opened a lot of doors and opportunities, including a good relationship with Styra, the commercial backer of OPA. Getting to work close to them as a business partner to Bisnode I got to know a whole bunch of enthusiastic and interesting personalities all sharing my interest for this emerging domain and technology. So while I’ve had the best of times at Bisnode and forever will be grateful for the opportunities they offered me, I eventually realized this was too good of an opportunity to pass up on.

Beginning December I will start my new position as the first developer advocate of Styra. What exactly awaits me remains to be seen, but from what I’ve experienced so far I know I will be in the best company possible. Getting to work on - and spread my enthusiasm for the things I enjoy doing the most, together with some of the best people in this space - I can’t beliebe my luck.

I wish I could thank all the people I’ve worked with at Bisnode for the last couple of years, but the list would just be way too long. Thank you Bisnode, and thank you all smart, kindhearted people who have been there with me along the way. You’ve easily made this time the best in my career so far, and many of you will remain some of my best friends. Keep up the good work, and I hope to see you soon.

A new journey awaits, and I can’t wait to get started. Styra, here I come!