This definitely got me by surprise, today I was told that I am gonna be the new CTO of tourware GmbH. I really wasn't expecting that so many years of dedication and love into this project would give me such an opportunity and when less you think of it, bum, CTO in one day.
What is tourware GmbH?
tourware GmbH is a small startup with big dreams, one of the German leading tour operator software providers with a growing customer base. At tourware we implement cutting edge technologies and we love what we do, by the looks of it our customers too :) We have launched in less than a year of work, a brand new cloud for tourism agencies and a complete integration with customer websites in different platforms (Wordpress, Angular, Vue) and other technologies. With the help of our team we have developed an API that allows our customers to access their travels via a REST API allowing us to expand fast.
Our main packages offer under a suitable monthly price for tour operators, a brand new website or integration with the existing customer websites and a fully featured backoffice where users can customize their website, create travel packages, itineraries, manage their contacts, accommodations, suppliers, prices, and everything is publicly online in customers website once you click save. If you are in the tourism industry, you may know that any tourism software will cost you big money and you not always get the best out of it. What I like the most about tourware is that our product is simple, modern and very solid.
As the CTO what will be my job from now on?
With many years developing Software Applications, focusing on the budget has not been my main goal, but mostly orchestrate things to work good and performant. However, from now on, my biggest goal should be to focus on saving costs to the company by taking life changing decisions not only for me, but for the complete infrastructure, for our team, and more importantly for our customers.
As many of you may already know, dealing with tourism sector is always complex, especially when you deal with multiple tour operators all in one cloud. Everyone has different needs, and let's not even get started talking about prices calculation, everyone does it different. Now imagine writing an endpoint that does this in a way that suits everyone.
I still need to learn a lot about being a CTO, this is definitely going to be a wonderful experience and a looooooong career.
Will I be able to get back to the code?
I have been thinking about this, but I would say this is mostly a question for the community, it would be nice to hear your story the pros and cons and maybe what and what not to do being a CTO. I think that from now on, I should not only emphasize on code quality, but for sure I can't block myself anymore in coding tasks, the most important is to be able to pass on to my colleagues my experience, explain what I think is correct and what is not, but more importantly listen to everyone and be the connector between business and technology, something that we have been striving for.
What the future awaits...
With a growing customer base at tourware, we have many chances to become the next multimillion tourism industry, we just have to keep working hard as we have proven so far, increase our team and keep an eye on costs to not explode. I am sure that I will be able to manage my new role, can't be happier and more thankful to our CEO Simon Milz for giving me this opportunity.
Let's meet in ITB Berlin
This will also be my first year when I join to the ITB Berlin event, so if you are around I will be happy to talk with you.
Conclusions
I am thrilled with this new opportunity, happy to be able to sail this boat alongside my team, I am still a newby in the CTO field, but for sure will be able to handle this as I did before in other fields of my career.
If any of you have experience with being CTO and you want to give me an advice, I am open to listen to everybody. Thank you for reading.
PS: Next article goes to our infrastructure and how we manage to scale NodeJS/MongoDB to the heaven :)
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