Getting to know us: meet Anko

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In this edition of our ‘Getting to know us’ series, we are introducing you to Anko, he’s our operations manager in Barcelona and full of surprises, as this unforgettable anecdote shows. A little bit of context first: at spriteCloud, we like to get to know our new team members through a little presentation during one of our spriteTalks. New hires introduce themselves by telling the team about their background, professional experience and hobbies in a couple of slides.

Anko wasn’t able to join the presentation where he should have introduced himself and so he prepared a video for the team. Believe it or not, in the video, he rapped his introduction! Making this the funniest and most original of all new hires’ presentations. Unfortunately, this won’t be a singing interview, but we hope you’ll enjoy it regardless. Let’s dive in!

Hi Anko, can you please introduce yourself?

Hello, I am Anko Beijleveld, I have a combined role of test consultant/manager and operations manager for spriteCloud Spain. I am from a town called Woudenberg located in the central part of the Netherlands but live in Spain, in the province of Barcelona province, since 2002. I am passionate about my family and really enjoy helping others reach their full potential. I am bad at cooking and ironing shirts. When cooking I burn the food, and when ironing I burn my hands.

My testing career started at KPN, on a very big project. After one week on a Friday afternoon, the environment administrator had to leave early and ask me to copy the production database to the test database. “Here are the instructions, can you do this”, he said. I responded: “yes of course”. At 18:00 I started all the steps. First, delete the test database… ok. That’s when I saw a big “are you sure?” warning flashing on the screen – and I pressed yes. Now make a backup of the production database. Ahh.. nooo, I deleted the production database. All Dutch phone numbers were gone… The rest is history among the team.

That sounds like a rocky start, but since you now have 20+ years of experience working in QA and testing, you must have saved the day after pressing that delete button! Coming back to your current role at spriteCloud, what do you like most about it?

I like the potential that spriteCloud Spain has. Building it from the ground up by finding, and working with, excellent talents to become successful in Spain. It is like having a start-up with the support of an experienced company. 

You’re our operations manager in Spain, but you also work as a test manager at our clients. How important do you find it to keep having hands-on testing experience for senior management? 

I work as a test manager at clients but I am unfortunately not so involved in the day-to-day testing activities, although I support them where possible. Personally, I think it is good to keep connected with hands-on testing as we are a specialized testing company.

I like the potential that spriteCloud Spain has. Building it from the ground up by finding, and working with, excellent talents to become successful in Spain. It is like having a start-up with the support of an experienced company.

Thinking about your career, where do you see yourself in the future? Are there any particular skills you’d like to develop?

That’s an easy question! Leading and working with a team of 50+ testers in Spain for international and local clients and focussing on operations and sales. 

Regarding the skills I would like to develop there are many, I think we need to continuously learn more and refresh our knowledge to keep up-to-date. I regret that in my freelance years I have not taken the time to do a lot of training. Most people think being freelance has only benefits, but a lot of time you forget to invest in training.

That’s some good advice for freelancers. If you had to choose one subject to focus on for your training what would it be and why?

I would actually choose two, testing and leadership. In terms of testing, I would like to learn more about test automation to be able to have really detailed knowledge. And when it comes to leadership, I think that that is essential for myself but also for testers who want to grow. I would like to improve my communication skills, as well as learn more about coaching others, team leading, strategy development and alignment.

Talking about leading a team, your colleagues in Spain work mostly remotely, how do you keep connected with them?

We are connected on Slack and Teams and have regular meetings. We try to meet and have lunch together about once a month. I have the goal to have our own fixed office soon where we can have more onsite collaboration and fun activities. For now, we occasionally work from a co-working space.

Moving on to after-work activities, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

I like to spend time with family, I also study a lot about religion (mostly Christian) and preach regularly. Together with my wife Francisca we also collect toys, food and clothes for families in need in Spain and the Dominican Republic. It is a lot of organizing, but when you can help someone it is definitely worth it. The picture below was taken when we were distributing some of the items we collected to the children.

 

Children receiving books.

If you are curious to learn more about what working at spriteCloud is like, follow our #lifeatspritecloud tag on LinkedIn. We are hiring regularly so if you think this is a place that you would feel at home in – and especially if you think you can introduce yourself with an even more original intro – head over to our jobs page and apply to one of our open positions. We look forward to meeting you!

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