My Journey as an IT Engineer at Dutch Mental Healthcare Company — NiceDay Nederland B.V.

NiceDay Nederland B.V.

Preface

It was a nice journey to work as IT Engineer at NiceDay Nederland. The company is online mental healthcare provider which is growing their market in the Netherland. NiceDay has successfully completed the number of treatments for more than ten thousand of mental health patients at Netherland since 2020 when it has been opened publicly. It is really nice that IT could help the company to treat patient in need.

I worked here initially as a Backend Engineer for the first year. Then, I worked as an Infrastructure Engineer too because the company was scaling the Infrastructure at OpenStack environment and at that time we didn’t have dedicated Infrastructure Team. Once the Backend Team and Infrastructure Team were separated, I moved totally into Infrastructure Team until 2022 because I have been responsible to maintain and develop the infrastructure at Google Cloud Platform environment.

I have domiciled in Bandung, Indonesia. So during my years with NiceDay, I was only able to work from the Bandung office together with other Indonesian colleagues from all over Indonesia. Most of my Indonesian colleagues live in Bandung.

After almost 5 years (4 years and 8months), I decided to leave NiceDay for pursuing my personal target in my next journey. It is very unfortunate. However, I have positive vibes about NiceDay that I had felt and now I want to share them with you.

Here we go!

A. Work-related stuffs

At NiceDay, I have learned so many things such as software development related to:

• Agile Development
• Software Development Cycle for each platform (mobile, portal, backend)
• Software Testing Cycle (both manual and automation)
• User story development: Build new feature, manage small team, demo our user story in front of stakeholders
• Collaborate with other development teams for resolving their issues when got an on-call schedule.

And some infrastructure related knowledges to:

• Containerization: Docker
• Container Orchestration: Rancher
• Continous Integration / Continous Delivery
• Google Cloud Platform
• Database: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis
• SaaS Database: Elastic Cloud, MongoDB Atlas, CloudSQL
• Monitoring: Prometheus + Grafana, Prometheus + Alert Manager, OpsGenie
• Logging: Elasticsearch + LogStash + Filebeat + Kibana
• Distributed Tracing: Sentry 10
• IaaC: Terraform + Atlantis + Github
• Automation: Ansible + AWX (Open Source Ansible Tower)
• Load Testing: K6
• Involved on building backend service for infrastructure purposed tasks by using Nest.js + OpsGenie API + Ansible Tower API
• Create Objectives and Key Results for Infrastructure Team
• Root Cause Analysis for particular issues from many different platforms
• Define and maintain SLA / SLO
• Define and maintain on-call rotation
• Teamwork

B. Colleagues

As far as I’ve experienced, I have really loved to work with NiceDay colleagues. They are supportive and constructive when someone gets an issue. Blameless culture is primary practice in our daily works.

Along with Bandung Team, I we have intense interaction when we have Friday Snack, team lunch and lunch. To be honest it has been a lot of fun. We have also used to playing some of board games such as:

• Exploding Kitten
• Gold Mine
• Werewolf
• Stacko, and
• Uno

In addition, some of us have happy hour agenda by playing online game together such as DrawBattle.io. Here, our colleagues from Bandung and Rotterdam compete each other on this online game.

Of course, this part is my subjective opinion. It could be various to the other NiceDay peers.

C. Benefit

I received a number of benefits during my years at NiceDay. Those benefit are:

• Competitive salary and it’s quite high paid in Bandung.
• BPJS Ketenagakerjaan
• BPJS Kesehatan
• Private health insurance (inpatient, outpatient, dental care, vision)
• Monthly team lunch
• Yearly festive allowance (THR)
• Festive gift (new year, Eid-Al Fitr, Christmas, employee birthday, NiceDay Anniversary, etc.), and
• Training budget up to 5 million IDR

To me, the benefits are satisfying if I have to compare it with them with other companies I had joined before. I really like those benefits because they were really helpful for some situations. This is one of my reasons to stay at NiceDay for a long time.

Not only did I receive the aforementioned benefits, I I prefered working from the office, I would have some more additional benefits such as:

• Daily free lunch
• Free snack bar
• Daily morning snack
• Afternoon Friday snack

At least, this work-from-office benefits helped me save my daily lunch fee. I enjoyed lunch time with many colleagues everyday or afternoon at Friday.

D. Advantages

Due to my domicile, I was alloed to either work from office in Bandung or from home. I did not have to pay for coworking space bill when I worked from the office. The office is only 10 km away from my home. It’s quite close if I ride my motorbike to the office.

I can say that I am really happy because I had a chance to work with colleagues from different countries.

• First, I have found that my English has improved compare to my English 6 years ago.
• Second, I have got a chance to get familiar European (generally) and Dutch culture (specifically).
• Third, not only did I collaborate with Dutch colleagues. but also with other colleagues from England, Germany, Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Kosovo, Japan, South Korea, Colombia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Pakistan, etc. and this has made feel like a global citizen.

There is a possibility for NiceDay employees at Bandung to receive an HQ visit if they have worked for years at NiceDay. It’s kind of a regular agenda. However, since COVID-19, the visit agenda was postponed for two years from 2020–2021. Happily, that postponed agenda has been lifted up and now my friends, Fajar and Jaga, will be visiting HQ at Rotterdam in Q3 2022.

Conclusion

There are so many benefit and advantages if you join NiceDay. I just want to thank you for giving me a chance to grow here at NiceDay.

Special Thanks

• Infrastructure Team: Ricky, William, Adit, Cynthia, Rheza, Taufik
• Backend Team: Pambo, Alam, Panji, Jeffry, Betim, Frendhi, Yanti, Tatsuya
• Mobile App Team: Xavi, Fajar, Jaga, James, Pavlos, Yusuf, Edi, Yudhis, Ahmad, Byoung Yong, Rizki
• Web Portal Team: Agung, Puguh, Arif, Rizal, Leo, Boby, Choirul, Gilang (Kacank)
• QA Team: Syahmia, Kiky, Azkia, Khalid, Reyhan, Hanni, Harry, Kurnia, Agung Purnomo, Devi, Waskita, Fitria, Aldo, Ganjar, Rizal Ijay
• Data Team: Jorge, Vicky, Maulana, Krithiesh
• Product Team: Merel, Ainhoa, Fia, Joel, Texas, Ruben, Kasper, Laurens
• Therapist (Psychologist) Team: Ilya, Wouter, Britt, Sarah
• Support Team: Alison, Martijn
• MarCom Team: Lisa, Ali
• Management Team: Esther, Umar, Judith, Rika, Anna, JP, Els, Andre

Also thank you so much to other colleagues, both current and former, at NiceDay from different teams and era who have interacted with me during my NiceDay years.

Bolded name refers to my current colleagues, while the opposite refers to my former colleagues at NiceDay

Thanks also to Khalid, Reyhan, Syahmia, Hanni, Kiky and Boby for helping me review this post. Really appreciate it.