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From Aviation to Cloud
Career paths usually don’t follow a straight line, as Martijn van de Grift’s career progression shows us. Starting out in aviation, he ended up in the cloud as an engineer. Now, he is on a mission to close the skills gap between higher education and professional businesses.
We are on a mission to make organizations cloud-native. Our backgrounds are very different, but it is our passion for cloud technology that ties us together. In this series of articles, we highlight the career path of our cloud specialists.
“When I had to decide about my higher education, ironically enough, I was convinced that I would not end up in IT. Initially, I started out studying Aviation. Eventually, this wasn’t the right direction for me. So, I decided to pursue a bachelor in IT, technical computer science”, de Grift explained.
It was during his first internship, research into cloud technology, when Martijn came to realize the potential of IT. It was a time when serverless cloud technology was state-of-the-art technology. Still today, de Grift sees the cloud as an enabler to bring ideas to market quickly.
“Let’s say that I have an idea about a cool app or website, the only thing I need to do is to write an application and push it to the cloud.”
The first cloud technology de Grift worked with was Amazon Web Services, but he has also been working on Google Cloud Platform for several clients.
Data Platforms
Despite the fact that de Grift is impressed with both AWS and GCP, he did find out that because of the speed of innovation it is pretty hard to stay up-to-date with all cloud platforms. That is why he decided to specialize in data applications.
It is the shared passion for technology, specifically cloud technology, that ties Xebians together. Each and everyone within the organization strives to be the best in its field. With every Xebian, you will experience a deep urge to bring clients further and make it easy for them to adopt cloud technology. One of Xebia’s core values is sharing knowledge. Consultants regularly deliver training courses, deliver presentations at conferences, and at our own internal mini-conferences Xebia Knowledge Exchanges. Martijn has taken the knowledge sharing up a notch.
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
Recently, an opportunity came along for de Grift to deliver classes to a group of students from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. de Grift did not hesitate to say yes. “It feels great to be able to give back to the university of applied sciences where I received my education. By contributing to developing the skills of future cloud engineers, I hope to give the next generation of cloud engineers the same type of head start I experienced some years ago!”
Check out the entire video of this interview on our Youtube channel: