Crowdsource IT Across Your Company

“HackyStack came out of the need to provision AWS accounts and GCP projects and at the time, AWS did not have any automation available. You had to manually go in and spend 20 minutes setting things up; it was not streamlined at all. We went into it saying, ‘It would be great if we can make this self service for our users. Let’s automate that.’” - Jeff Martin, Sr. IT Systems Engineer

As part of the GitLab company values, there is a strong focus on iteration and efficiency, particularly with using boring solutions, minimum viable change iterations, efficiency for the right group, and global optimization.

Many organizations find themselves using boring solutions, however it’s important as IT leaders to look at how your team can build or enable the next iteration of the boring solution towards self service for users in addition or instead of administrator self service.

It's crucial to enable a large group of engineers to be more productive. That's why one of Jeff's guiding principles is to strategically invest time to automate the most tedious tasks for hundreds of team members to solve economies of scale problems.

As IT organizations evolve and mature, Jeff suggests that the IT team’s focus on resolving help desk tickets evolves or expands into elevating the whole company through automation. To do that, IT needs to embrace great ideas that come from all over the company.

For the last eleven years, Jeff has built an engineering career building impactful internal platform-as-a-service products for customer-facing departments (sales engineers, professional services, customer training hands-on labs, customer support, etc.). The irony is that Jeff didn’t join the IT department until last year and has been in a solo or small team shadow IT infrastructure capacity for most of the last decade.