The Story of 10Clouds’ Tech Hub – A Catalyst for Innovation

Aleks Kraśnicki, currently serving as our Tech Hub Manager at 10Clouds, embarked on his journey with us as a JS Developer over eight years ago. Since then, he has traversed through diverse industries, from oil tanker fleet management to battery charging optimization, before assuming his latest role.

But what exactly is our Tech Hub? And what role does it play in supporting innovation at 10Clouds and therefore innovation for our clients? We decided to find out.

Welcome Aleks, and thank you for sharing your experience with us. So could you tell us a bit about Tech Hub and its main goal?

Sure. Tech Hub is a proactive team of highly experienced seniors, which we created to catalyze technical advancements internally – which of course benefits our clients. It has several key goals: to foster innovation, mitigate tech-related issues and optimize strategies. The ultimate aim is to enhance 10Clouds’ technical excellence and efficiency – and to deliver more successful products.

Project efficiency is key for clients. How does Tech Hub help to ensure that you’re delivering streamlined solutions with the shortest possible ‘time to value’?

‘Time to value’ is crucial for so many product owners – and Tech Hub is there to support developers in making this as short as possible.

We step in during challenging projects, offering impactful solutions. But really, the main aim is to prevent issues from happening, rather than fixing them afterwards. So we always aggregate the lessons learned and provide new standards for work in specific areas. For example, a recent one was streamlining the process of risk mitigation and technical project monitoring.

Another key area of our work is the general optimization of 10Clouds’ approach to product delivery. We aim to utilize new technologies to speed up our work for clients and to provide solutions that are specifically tailored to their unique needs. We’re on constant lookout for low-code/no-code solutions that help optimize our work and make boring and repetitive tasks easier and faster.

Importantly, we also make sure everyone in the company has access to AI development tools like Github CoPilot, JetBrains AI, Chat GPT, and our own AIConsole!

But Tech Hub also plays an important role during project inception?

Exactly. Tech Hub has an oversight of the pre-sales process. Here, our role is to not not only check the projects for potential issues at the moment of estimation, but also to develop tools and statistics to make the technical estimation process more accurate and robust.

Can you provide an example of how Tech Hub has enabled us to provide quicker solutions or save costs for clients?

We recognized that, for certain projects, our typical method of directly utilizing AWS and DevOps support proved challenging, not necessarily in terms of maintenance but rather due to the discrepancy between implementation costs and client budgets. After extensive research and testing, we made the decision to leverage Render.com hosting coupled with Tech Hub-created blueprints for these projects. These blueprints notably speed up infrastructure creation and upkeep while typically circumventing the need for DevOps support – allowing backend developers to manage them with ease.

And then there were further solutions that improved efficiencies for clients related to using the MVP approach, implementing coding standards, security, preferred libraries, and other no-code/low-code solutions.

What are you currently focusing on in TechHub?

Right now we’re experimenting with a bunch of different AI-powered tools to help our developers in day to day tasks and offer our clients more value for their money. Whenever possible, we’re checking if we can implement these tools in our current pipelines and if the gain is really worth the transition.

It’s also important to note that we’re not just researching and preparing new solutions but also making sure we promote knowledge and technologies throughout the company.

I’m constantly on the lookout for people that have used some interesting technology or approach in their work for clients, and making sure that they share this knowledge with the rest of the company.

And on a personal level, what brings you the most satisfaction in your role at 10Clouds? What are you most proud of?

Tech Hub has been around for about 5 years now, with its approach evolving over time. About a year ago, I proposed a new structure to enhance efficiency and productivity. I was given the opportunity to implement these changes, and as a team, we’ve seen that it was a successful transition. Tech Hub is now more efficient than ever, and I am particularly proud of the workflow updates we’ve introduced, which have had a significant impact.

However, what truly impresses me is the dedication and talent of my Tech Hub team, whose hard work is at the heart of our success. I feel fortunate to work alongside such skilled and professional individuals.

Thank you Aleks. We’re sure Tech Hub will go from strength to strength!

Want to see where your career at 10Clouds could take you?

Join our team by applying to one of our job ads, or send us your CV. Who knows, we might be looking for someone with your skillset right now.