A day in the life of Level Level – Hustling hosting with Marc.

Of course we would love to see this tile for sale at Xenos, but you can’t have it all. A job with us, on the other hand, you can! What is life like at Level Level? In more serious language: what is it like to work with us?

Of course, automating something isn’t going to happen automatically. Who does that at Level Level? That must be our one and only Marc! In this blog more about what he at Level Level and how he became one of our hosting experts?

Hi Marc! Please tell, what are you working on right now?

We are currently working on many innovations in our clients’ hosting environments. Once in a while you have to clean up and freshen up various things in order to keep up with the latest features and security. I am also working a lot on automation and process optimisation for both hosting and development.

How did you grow from your work as a developer into the role of hosting engineer?

That actually went very organically. After my 3rd year HBO internship, I started as a part-time developer at Level Level and after that I got the opportunity to do my graduation research at Level Level as well. During my graduation period, I was supervised by Bernard and I became more interested in the hosting/automation side of web development. This turned out to be so much to my liking that I started talking to Bernard to see if I could pick up more of those kinds of tasks within Level Level. And yes, I could!

Which software or tools do you prefer to work with and why?

During my graduation thesis it was useful to be able to set up a test environment without too much effort. I then started investigating what kind of software I needed to set up server environments automatically. After some research, I ended up at Ansible. Ansible is a configuration management tool. This means that you manage the installation and configuration of your server environment in an automated way and that you use scripts to set up server environments automatically. If something is unintentionally changed on the server, those changes can be automatically reversed.

Because I was so enthusiastic about Ansible during my graduation research, Bernard and Taeke gave me the opportunity to actually use this for our work at Level Level.

Ansible gives you so much freedom and possibilities that it has become the ideal tool for me to direct our automation.

What makes you indispensable as a hosting engineer? Because you are, of course!

This is going to sound very poetic, but I think that every role within Level Level is indispensable. Without the hosting department we can’t provide our customers with the hosting quality that we want to be able to guarantee ourselves, without developers it’s impossible to create great features and sites and without designers everything just doesn’t look as beautiful… Developers are not the best designers 😉 And if our project managers don’t tick us off once in a while, we’ll be working on each website for a year… Definitely will become a great website, but it’s going to be bad for your wallet!

What qualities do you really need to be a good hosting engineer?

An eye for detail is very important! As with development, it is often the case in this field that one letter can make the difference between a working and a broken site. You also need a ‘drive’ to optimise processes.

What do you like best about your work at Level Level?

The relatively flat management structure, where you also have an influence on your work and how it is done. And all this while people work well together without conflicts or mutual problems. You don’t find that just anywhere! 💪🏼