Career stories

Name: Klaudijus Rulys

Age: 24

How did you hear about the Infinity Works (IW) Academy programme? 

My university (Newcastle University) was organising a job fair and handing out pamphlets of who’s going to be there. I saw Infinity Works and remembered the guest lectures Tom Walton and Danielle Cooper did at the university. I remember them showing us CI/CD pipelines and I was amazed by how cool it looked.

What attracted you to apply for the IW Academy?

In the above-mentioned job fair, I met with Danielle and I could feel how enthusiastic she was about the company. They were also the only company that showed an understanding of what DevOps which was my main interest. Due to this, Infinity Works really stood out to me from the rest of the attendees there and I signed up to be later emailed by Danielle on how to apply.

What were you doing at the time?

University. I also worked part-time at Five Guys.

What were your career ambitions (and how did IW fit into this)?

I wanted to get into DevOps. It seemed and still seems a fairly complex and difficult career path to take. Infinity Works seemed to be somewhat specialising in this and I thought it would be great to get good habits in from the start.

What did you enjoy most about your time with the Academy?

One half was definitely the social aspect of it. There were 20 of us, but we all got along very well. The other half was the experiences shared by the Academy leads. They were both very experienced developers and while I learned a lot from the course content, I think I learnt a lot as well just from them sharing their experience.

What did you learn about becoming a successful consultant?

The group project we had definitely helped me. It taught me a lot about managing expectations and being careful about what you say. It also taught me how to understand the stakeholders. There were a lot of failures on my part, where I had promised features I didn’t know how to implement.

How have you found your first few months as a consultant at Infinity Works? 

Reasonably well. The project I first went on had a completely different tech stack than what I saw in the Academy. They were also in the midst of wanting an architectural change in the presence of short deadlines. I think the Academy definitely prepared me to be able to discuss the architecture change with the senior developers there and understand their concerns and reasons for why they want the change.

The only difficulty I had was jumping into an existing codebase. But I think every consultant has that and it was just a matter of time until I got acquainted with the codebase.

What words of advice would you give to someone starting this year’s Academy?

Try to get involved in the social aspect of Infinity Works as much as possible. Everyone is friendly, and it’s great knowing that you have a ton of support from everyone around you. I’m currently in London, but I still have people I ask for help from the Leeds office because I built up that connection with them. I realised that your colleagues are so important for creating your own support and learning network.