Meet the creator of our Knowledge Base

Zammad Diary | Mantas Masalskis: On Routines, Cycling, and Hunting the Mammoth

Meet Mantas, our colleague from Lithuania who has been an essential part of the Zammad developer team for a few years now. He's the Master of Fixing Bugs, unofficially in charge of Secret Santa, and always up for a laugh. Find out more about his life and work at Zammad in his interview!

Welcome to the Zammad Diary! What‘s your name and position at Zammad?
Hey! My name is Mantas and I'm a software developer at Zammad.

What are you known for?
It'd be better to ask my colleagues. But I guess I'm the "if there's a nasty bug nobody wants to jump onto, send it to him and he'll love it" guy.

What are you working on right now?
Most of my work is in two areas. One is the Knowledge Base. I wrote most of the original implementation. And I keep looking after it. The other one is improving internalization and localization. Be it quirky email encodings or timezone conversion issues.

What was the last thing you learned on the job?
Job #1 is sleep. If you don't get enough high-quality sleep, you will perform poorly.

What motivates you in the morning?
Hunting down the mammoth and thrash metal.

What do you enjoy most about working remotely? (And what do you dislike?)
5-years-ago-me would have said the flexibility to ride bicycles whenever and wherever. Nowadays - the ultimate flexibility to take care of my family and still put in a ride here and there.

How do you entertain your team?
Introducing bugs?

Which industry or brand should definitely start using Zammad?
Very few industries do not need to dramatically improve their support. But public services is definitely #1.

How do you break free from your routines?
Having a 2 y/o in the house... Bring back the routine, please.

What does your workspace look like?

Do you have a passion that isn‘t obvious from your resumé?
No. I find ways to insert my passions into my CV.

What inspires you?
Quality as in "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance"

What is great teamwork for you?
Not stepping on each other toes but providing helpful feedback when one gets stuck

What would you do if money didn‘t matter?
Write software and ride bicycles

What app should really be invented?
A bicycle chain and sprockets wear measurement app

You have 1,000 unread messages and only time to reply to 50 of them. How do you prioritize?
Most recent 50. If something was important, I bet they kept emailing me over and over again.

How do you define success?
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

What are two pieces of career advice you‘d like to share?
Some hobbies better stay hobbies (hi history and anthropology!). But chasing €€€ probably won't take you far either. It's all about finding the right balance.

How do you explain your job to your parents?
Write software that runs on a computer.

What is one thing you‘d have liked to know before you started working at Zammad?
Don't like bleeding edge software and moving fast while breaking everything? Welcome home.

What do you miss from your old job?
Native apps!

Which Zammad feature do you like best?
Knowledge Base :)

What‘s your favorite Zammad anecdote?
Two typos walk into a codebase.... and stay around for years. I still miss the good old "execute_singel_backend"

Which famous person would you like to have on the Zammad team? Why?
Ex-politicians to lobby for Open Source in the public sector. [Insert your favorite politician here].

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