Who is Sebastian Bonholt?

WHOIS…? is a format in our tech blog where we present you the many faces of our tech community. These are the people, that work every day on our state-of-the-art technical solutions to make BurdaForward so unique.

We're excited to present once again a valued member of our tech community who took the time to answer our questions and give us insights into his daily work: Sebastian Bonholt.  
You might recognize Sebastian and his team from our previous article by AWS: “BurdaForward Automates Scaling, Cuts Infrastructure Costs by up to 65% on AWS”.

What’s your name & what techie cliché is totally true for you? 

Hi I'm Sebastian. One cliché which would perfectly match is out of the fashion realm. If I find clothes which fit, I tend to buy them more than once. Afterwards I just keep reordering the same item.

What is your role at BurdaForward? 

I'm head of Affiliate Marketing Technologies, a service team which ensure our colleagues have easy access to generate affiliate revenues*.

*What does “affiliate revenue” mean?

Let’s bring it to life with an example: You look for a new graphics card but prefer to buy it at the most attractive price. So you visit our price comparison page, like this one. When you find a product and then click through to buy it, the retailer will pay us a small commission. This commission means no extra cost for you, as the buyer. 

We also run our price comparison engine which gives you an overview the cheapest products at the best shops (either on the portal or via API). You can find an example for our price comparison as a directly user facing product on www.bestcheck.de. Data that was integrated via API can be found embedded in our pages like www.chip.de/bestenlisten 

What do you do as Head of Affiliate Marketing Technologies? 

I'm in a dual role of product owner and people manager.

What is the job of your team at BurdaForward? 

We are running our price comparison and the affiliate tracking service on a technical side. Additionally we ensure that revenues out of this business are distributed to the job teams* which actually made the money. We import, harmonize and distribute a lot of data.

*What are “job teams?”
 
At BurdaForward, we structured our company after the “job to be done” (JTBD) method. What exactly JTBD is, how to implement it and what it has to do with milkshakes, you can read here. 

When & Why did you start to work in tech? 

Professionally I started in 2008 as a working student doing Q&A. During this time I realized I'm quite good at translating non tech speech into something which tech people can work with. I was always doing something with the internet so I kept doing it. Private my first contact with tech was in 1989 (I was 7 back then) when my parents brought home a used C64. I disassembled and assembled it a lot. In 1993 we got our first dial-up Web connection this was when I started building websites (Geocities J). Later in 1995 / 1996 my mum asked me to build her first website. When I finished school I did the classic thing with not finishing my studies in informatics (but Print- and Media Technologies later on).

What is your favorite part about working in tech? 

I´m always amazed that all of this works. I mean: we turn power on and off a couple of billion times and you have something like the internet. I'm more of a later stage product person. So I'd like to look for bestpractice and ensure products are build with a focus on stability, low cost and maintainability. This pays out in the long run.

What is your “tech superpower”? 

Being able to translate between stakeholders and dev colleagues.

And how did you use it recently? (Maybe insights to a recent project) 

Hard to say. I´m using it each and every day. Maybe a more general example. A colleague approached me saying he has an idea which could safe us a lot of money. In the end providing him the room (time) to do it worked out with significant savings on our RDS instances.

What advice would you like to give techies out there? 

The longer I work in tech the more I realize how less I know. What´s most important don´t follow each trend. Try to understand patterns, best-practices and algorithms. It´s better to build a boring product which makes money than something new and fancy which loses it.

Did you find any nice tool/software/technology/… recently that you would like to share? 

What I discovered recently is lsd (https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd) this is a drop-in replacement for LS. Generally I like the commandline a lot. I like the idea of having something which does one thing really well and combining it with other things which do other things really well.

Can we find out more about you on social platforms (LinkedIn, GitHub, Tech Blogs, Link to an article on our post…)? 

Sure, look here: https://sebbe.de. You´ll find all social options. 

Any famous last words? 

If you work at a large website / platform try to learn the basics. Don´t go for huge levels of abstraction, start small. Setup your own blog and write about something.