Basti, Software Engineer

Our team here at justDice is a blend of fun and professional. And that’s what these posts aim to unlock. We want the Humans of justDice features to focus on getting to know the people and minds behind the scenes. We’ll get to know a different team member every month, giving you an exclusive look into how we work together here at justDice 🙂

Sebastian, although everyone calls him Basti, is a justDice OG. He joined in 2017 as a QA tester intern, and 2024 marks his seventh year with us. Now a fully fledged software engineer whom the team often consults for advice, we thought he’d be a great person to chat with about justDice and his experiences so far. Enjoy!

1. What do you enjoy most about working at justDice?

Looking back at the past 7 years, I joined in 2017, it’s not one single thing I enjoy the most but rather the whole package. One part is the start-up vibe: You know and can have a chat with literally everyone and overall a very casual environment.

Then, I also love having diverse tasks to work on. I love to dip my toes into related fields like UI/UX, project management, process refinement, software architecture, DevOps, etc. and here I get to explore those as much as I want.

We also get as much autonomy as we want when working on features, allowing us to create an environment that lets me push my skills to the limit.

And lastly, your impact matters. It’s not like in the bigger companies I worked before where your work has little impact and results don’t show for weeks or months. Here you get immediate feedback and see if your feature worked or not and how much impact it has.

2. How has your role evolved at justDice over the years?

So I started in 2017 as a Student QA in our Apps Team. I worked before as a Full-Stack Developer, but during that phase of my studies I wanted to focus more on the degree. After getting my Bachelors I transitioned back into the Full-Stack Developer role because I longed to build stuff again.

Between 2021 and 2023 I supported our experimental Game Development unit, again as a Full-Stack Developer and got to see a completely different working environment compared to app development.

After that experiment concluded I’m now back in my old Apps Team working as a Full-Stack Dev on our Apps and Backend.

3. Favourite tasks/tools to work with? Least favourite?

I have to say GitLab. I’m coming from a world of JIRA and Confluence and admittedly hated with a passion. GitLab was a revelation and I don’t want to miss it. A dev tool made by developers, for developers.

I should probably also mention MacOS. Given I really worked with everything over the course of my career,  starting out on Windows machines, made the transition to Linux when joining justDice and now working on MacOS. I’m not an Apple Fanboy, but when it comes to working machines, that is my go to OS. It’s basically premium Linux. 

Also a shoutout to GitKraken, saving my life a couple of times.

The least favorite is probably still JIRA/Confluence. But time has passed, so I would have to check them again before giving my final verdict.

4. Memorable accomplishment at justDice?

There are actually quite a few, but I will start with the first big thing I feel I contributed: The Continuous Integration pipeline scripts for building react-native apps. I think it was during my study time back when I was a QA or I was just transitioning to Full-Stack Developer, I can’t remember. I was still new to GitLab and never worked on anything DevOps related, but I wanted to do it and got the time, so I went ahead and created our unique Continuous Integration scripts in one or two weeks. That code is running our pipelines to this very date and everytime I do an update to those scripts I still see changes with my name from that time.

5. Favourite aspect of the Apps Team?

I’ll keep this one short: The people 🙂

6. How would you describe the justDice team?

It’s pretty much like university. You have highly qualified people working together on one goal in a pretty relaxed environment. Everyone helps one another, no one is left behind.

7. What advice would you give new software engineers?

Don’t take the relaxed environment as a sign of people slacking. Everyone is expected to push, but also know everyone will be more than happy to help you achieve your goals.

8. Finally, something fun or expected about you

Some of the team already know, but I’m a big World of Warcraft fan and for 3 years, I used to be a raid leader in a WoW guild!