Meet Jonas. He's a Cloud Engineer.

I love each and every one of my hats

What is a cloud engineer? Well, in practice, it is a full-stack developer with a focus on cloud technologies. And that's what I do, alongside working with scientists to improve their scientific workflows and enable innovation at Novo Nordisk. I love working in life sciences. With my background in biology, I deeply enjoy generating solutions that help find next-generation drugs, which might impact patients' lives in a positive way. The open-ended nature of the job and the openness to new ideas are inspiring. 

You only use it for self-defence? Right? Right?

☯ I have a black belt in judo.

Joining

Office productivity is so boring

I decided to work here because I found the opportunity to combine my passions, which are data, biology, and science. As a coder, this is a lot more interesting to me than creating office productivity tools or similar things. Before joining, I knew of Novo Nordisk as a company with generous benefits, but I didn't have any other particular thoughts about the company back then. However, I've been genuinely surprised by the laid-back culture I found here, and the approachability of senior management.

I found my way from biology to coding thanks to the iGEM competition, which prompted me to do my master’s in Bioinformatics. I gained my first real-world cloud experience through my job at NNE, where I actually worked on some Novo Nordisk projects. And then, probably the real reason behind me joining, I was headhunted for a tech lead role here at Novo Nordisk.

Shoo-in

✄ I make shoes sometimes (they’re not very good… yet)

Work

Another dimension, another dimension

The biggest challenges here are the different levels of digitalisation across the organisation. All levels of maturity exist simultaneously. But that's also what makes my job interesting.

Recently, I worked on an app that deals with scientific data from what's called high-content screening analysis. This is microscopic imagery with extremely high throughput, and the datasets tend to be huge. To lower the dimensionality of the data, and to make it intuitively interactive for scientists at their first contact with the data they had generated, we created a smart app solution using machine learning. The app automatically finds new data and processes it through a pipeline before transforming it into something presentable that is easy to interact with.

The technologies I use the most are Python, Vue.js, Golang, all kinds of services provided by AWS, and some SQL databases. My preference is Vue for the frontend, and Python for the backend and data processing.

Development Milestones

␥ Mastering the basics of human biology during my studies ␥ Learning the fundamentals of data science through a bioinformatics course at university ␥ Self-teaching myself Python programming ␥ Learning a JavaScript frontend framework (React). After that, all others became easy ␥ Having friends motivate me to learn and then delving into the ins and outs of Linux.

Chef’s table

⍦ I love cooking, and not to toot my own horn, but I am pretty good at it