A small plane is ploughing through the clouds. The parachute on Aleksei’s back has been checked and double-checked. His heart is pumping but he’s good to go. The door of the plane opens. Aleksei gets up. He has a fear of heights but is drawn to the challenge. He is standing at the plane door. He won’t look down. Now, he’s halfway out the door. The signal comes. Aleksei jumps.
For a while he is hero of the clouds. He lands smoothly. His fear conquered. The challenge has energised him, left him buzzing with self-belief and ready for more challenges. Back at work, Aleksei wants to help his customers make their own leap and become the heroes of their own clouds.
“I don’t hate Sunday evenings”
A self-described, hard-working team player with a can-do attitude for completing tasks, Aleksei Panin loves solving puzzles and jumping into new challenges. Put another way, Aleksei loves his job.
“And I don’t hate Sunday evenings,” he says, “Very often my physical body comes home on Friday night but my brain stays at work. That’s when something is bothering me in a good way.” But he is learning to balance family and work and trying to get better at switching off.
Aleksei’s wife and three daughters don’t appreciate it if his mind is too much up in the clouds when they want his attention. The same goes for the two big family dogs, a Doberman and a Pointer, who are keen to get him out to the forest. But he has taught himself to put whatever’s puzzling him onto the back burner. “Then answer will come suddenly while I’m taking a shower or out for a walk.”
Before joining NordHero, Aleksei worked several years at education solutions start-up, Almerin, which was daring to develop an intelligent e-learning system for elementary and junior high school students as a part of ambitious European project. At Almerin, Aleksei first saw cloud computing and all its amazing possibilities in action when the company migrated its e-learning system infrastructure into the AWS cloud. “I was so thrilled by all the possibilities this cloud could provide and started learning new services and technologies with a very big hunger and have never stopped,” Aleksei recalls. He went on to work as a system designer for Etteplan, where he got hands-on experience with SysOps administering tasks on AWS, through DevOps tasks, and all the way to practical designing and implementing agile, highly available and scalable serverless architectures on AWS.
Life hacks at home
Aleksei also likes applying his work knowledge for life hacks at home. “I like automating different tasks,” he says, describing one recent advance in his own smart home system, where he managed to connect the warmer mechanism in his car to his google calendar, which includes the family hobby schedule. The calendar talks to the weather app and, depending on the temperature outlook, will activate the car warmer – half an hour, one hour, or even two hours in advance, which means the car will be warm and ready at the right time. “These kinds of applications are useful and great fun,” Aleksei enthuses.
Going deeper into security
Now, Aleksei has jumped into NordHero to be surrounded by like-minded cloud hero-makers. As well as working to deliver viable and creative solutions to fit NordHero customer needs, Aleksei brings with him a growing experience and interest in web security.
This includes learning different web hacking techniques to better understand where vulnerabilities might lie and how to counter them. “I want to go deeper into the security side of things,” Aleksei says “I’m very mindful of the need for reliable and secure solutions to protect our NordHero customers and their customers.”
It’s like checking and then double checking the metaphorical parachute to ensure that customers going into new cloud ventures will get a soft-landing. Then all they have to do is take the leap.