Up close and Personal with Thy- Cloud Computing at Colibri

At Colibri, we pride ourselves on being a great family for tech talents with unique skills looking for perfect roles to maximize their prospective. To put it plainly, we love sharing, finding solutions, absorbing the latest technology, and doing our best.

Thy - is one of our talented cloud computing developers, who has joined Colibri with a passion for technology and a desire to be challenged.

After finishing an abroad training and working for many years, Thy was ready for a new step in her career. And that’s where Colibri’s role - Cloud Engineering - fit in well.

Kim Thy

Cloud Engineer at Colibri Growth.

Hi Thy , Could you share with us a bit about yourself and what brought you to software engineer?

I am Thy. I’m a full-time Cloud developer with five years of experience, starting my career as a software developer and now as a Cloud Engineer. As a developer, until pretty recently I was working on design, and support cloud computing which is really fun and interesting. One thing I like about my role is migrating different functions to a cloud-based system. It's important and fun to actually spend time on data manually and maintain as well as work with individual things. The journey has been rough, fast, and exciting.  Along each stage of my journey from Fresher through to Engineer, and I have learned and grown confident. Currently, I landed a great role as a cloud tech developer at Colibri. A lot of people might wonder how I got where I am today.

I would ove to share my story in the hope to inspire you as I hope my journey will resonate with other developers and add value to their career path planning.

Where it all began

Five years ago, when I was a university student, I had a chance to intern in Singapore. At this time, I felt like I needed a much bigger challenge. That’s why I decided to leave my country and apply for an internship at National University of Singapore (NUS). Through my internship, I was able to develop both professional and social relationships that helped me confidently enter the “real” work market. It also provided the opportunity to work with a breadth of different people and learn about different cultures and work perspectives. It did not take long to adapt to the new environment and culture. Basically, anything interesting that I worked on took 1-2 months. Those were fun and worthwhile times, I could practice and learn deeply with computing as well as develop personal qualities and further skills. My professors would give me a series of challenging assignments that were hard but always within my abilities. Thanks to them that I have improved gradually over time which was vital to my growth! Overall, this was an amazing experience and completely worth dealing with all coding bugs.

The six months that I spent in Singapore gave me unforgettable memories and most importantly, I got to my first real work experience which encouraged me to follow a career path I truly liked.

What motivated you to pursue something new, particularly something in the tech industry?

I loved being a math major and studying scientific subjects, and playing with the computer when I was a high school student. I thought people would tell me which code to write, and then I would write that code when I started learning to program, and that would be all. 

After finishing the internship and graduating, I shared the same struggle of many fresh graduates to find a job, so I looked for recruiters in my field.

Luckily, I got an offer, and my first job was as a developer. Then, a year and a half later, I landed a second job as an engineer developer at another company. These first jobs helped me to built a solid foundation in software engineering while this may not sound like a lot of experience, finishing my second year as a developer was a huge milestone for me. 

Overall, my time as a Software Engineer was great. I acquired a deeper comprehension of the software development life cycle and I began to specialise in certain areas.

Other reason why I love being a developer is the fact that it is a creative job, give you the opportunity to innovate and not unimportantly, it’s a well-paid profession.

Getting a new job

After that, I was looking for a change in my career, so I started to try new things and looking for a new roles to challenge myself. I received an offer for a Cloud Engineering position at Colibri. The interview process went very well and we had an immediate connection. I’m happy that my previous work experiences, personal traits and mindset were very well aligned with the position and that’s what led to my successful candidacy for the job. , and the position I put myself in as a candidate that led to my success. 

Tell me about your role at Archanan ? What’s your typical day as a Cloud engineer looks like? What part about your role do you find most exciting?

I have started to work and learn about Cloud computing, which is a field of which I have great interest in which I desire to direct my passion and curiosity in learning new things. I use networking, server administration, scripting and vulnerability, and pen testing skills to help architect and support our system layouts. Almost everything I’ve learned or done at previous jobs help me manage our cloud environment in some way because the foundations have a lot of similarities.

Being with Colibri and my team Archanan, I have learned a huge amount of new things that span from consolidating my programming skills to understanding and deploying cloud infrastructure.  At Colibri, I learned how to work in a team, deliver engaging presentations, and how to manage my time effectively.

Being a Cloud Developer, my role is building up skills by either doing my own tasks and assisting my team. We also have daily standard checks to check on the work we are doing and to highlight any blocker that we might face. Personally, I love it when I am assigned a new task: it is the most exciting part of a project and it allows me to do a bit of research on the things I have to deliver. 

I am currently the only girl in my team, this for me was not something that intimidated me, but motivated me. It also supported me to expand my experiences and mature to see that women process information perfectly in certain issues that can support the team. I have been building up my knowledge on a daily basis to feel confident about my work. My super skill is my ability to learn quickly and efficiently. 

Joining Colibri Family is the foundation for my personal career development so far.

What are your hobbies outside of work?

I love traveling, spending coffee time with friends on the weekend, and regularly practicing yoga. I have already planned to travel abroad this year, (which would take place on summer days in 2020), but, now with the COVID-19 situation, I have to postpone the trip to next year.

Sometimes at work, I often get stressed, I try to rest and sleep a little. Practicing yoga is a great way to release stress and also helped me enhance health and balance. I sit all day, every day, so I do some time for this great activity to improve my mental and productivity.

Career goal

I was thinking about the career goals that I could achieve. I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of my basic goals met such as earn a stable income, learn lessons at work, and work with a kind and competent team. 

One goal in the further future is I hope I can become an expert in the System IT Test. Colibri and Archana team is an amazing opportunity for which I am so grateful.  Joining the Colibri Family is the foundation for my personal career development so far.

“Try as many as possible due you never know what opportunities you can find and a great opportunity can be close to you”

It has seen a pleasure sharing my work journey with you all. I hope you have found this post useful and certain areas can help you shape your journey. As for me, I am confident that I will achieve all of my career goals in the future!

Thy Dao