I’m Daniel, a Senior Director of Engineering at Sentry, where I’m responsible for Telemetry and run our Vienna office.
I always knew I wanted to be an engineer.
It started the first time I played Super Mario on that huge, grey Game Boy with the red buttons. I knew right then: I wanted to make a video game.
I started writing code as soon as I learned about it in high school.
I think I must have been around 15 at the time.
First, it was C. We made some fun command-line games, like Roulette or picking cards. A few years later, we touched the Web - first with Java, then with the classic XAMPP stack.
I guess you belong to a special club if you know what an XAMPP stack is without Googling it.
That was the first time it really clicked for me. All of it felt so simple and intuitive. PHP was the first language I truly dove into, and with Dreamweaver and other tools, I was building full websites in no time.
Also, put Dreamweaver on the special club list.
I built everything:
- Image galleries to share pictures with friends and family.
- Guestbooks.
- Full websites for real companies (and some made-up ones).
- Even something close to a social media page, combining all of the above.
Keep in mind, most resources back then were dry documentation about the PHP language or the good old w3schools.com. It was exciting; it felt like I could build anything I could dream of.
Closer to my final year, I even started my own company, hosting websites on bare-metal servers for actual customers in a server rack I rented at our local city provider’s first server farm. It was fucking awesome.
The Early Days
After I finished high school; well, to make the point, I need to explain it wasn’t a normal high school. It was a “Höhere Technische Lehranstalt,” which literally translates to “Technical High School.” lol.
It was one year longer than usual, but because it was technical, after graduation and three years of job experience, you were officially allowed to carry the title “Ingenieur” (Engineer).
Yeah, Austrians have a weird fetish for titles. To be honest, I had no idea about this when I joined the school at 14.
So after I graduated, not yet officially Engineer Daniel Griesser, I had to do Austria’s mandatory military service. This was a real downer since I just wanted to continue on my path. But there was no way around it. I actually did social service as an alternative; which is three months longer, duh. I still went for it, as I wasn’t keen on being in a very strict and limiting environment for six months.
Losing nine months while I was in a full sprint sucked.
I have to say, looking back, those nine months were great and I wouldn’t want to miss them. I made new friends, learned new things outside my bubble, and most importantly, it made me realize what I don’t want to do.
I tried to continue with my company during that time, but I learned that running your own business is hard. It’s not just people knocking on your door asking if they can give you money to build a website. It’s everything: taxes, marketing, sales, coding, support… just everything.
So, it didn’t go super well. After the nine months, I tried with a bit more effort, but it still felt like I was swimming against the current. It wasn’t flowing.
Then I had some side jobs, enrolled at university, and just floated around for about a year. University in Austria is practically free, and if your grades were good enough, you could even get a stipend.
Enough money to get by if you still live at your parents’ house, which I did.
But to get the stipend, you needed to finish a few courses. Yeah… I never got the money. I went to university for exactly one day. I still remember vividly thinking to myself: “Oh god, I’m going to learn so much crap I don’t care about. I just want to write code and solve problems.”
I really think universities are an awesome thing. I don’t want to say it’s not worth going - it just wasn’t for me. I later learned I missed out on a ton of learnings and experiences.
The Agency Grind
After a while, and a heart-to-heart with my mom, I decided it was time for a change. It was time to get a real job. In my mind, I picked the best local web company, Webwerk (it still exists!), and they hired me instantly after I showed them what I could do.
It was great. I worked with different languages - ASP.NET, some Visual Basic, random bash scripts, all kinds of stuff. The websites they maintained had real users, and the stakes were higher. It felt like I was being paid to learn. It was amazing. I also learned how awesome it was to be part of a larger team, hang out after work, and talk shit about bosses and customers. I learned how fun it was working in a team.
Eventually, my girlfriend at the time moved to Graz for university. I followed her, in pursuit of the next, better company where I could continue to grow.
Quick detour…
One day at Webwerk, we had a team meeting to brainstorm our new company website. Of course, we looked at what other companies were doing. The one we all looked up to was called Datenkraft. They just had the best customers and the cleanest homepage you could imagine. It also felt like every web company had a curse where they needed to build a new homepage for themselves every year to showcase the latest tech. For us engineers, it was exciting - a time to experiment and apply what we’d learned.
Back to Graz…
I applied to Datenkraft. The process was more professional, but they also didn’t hesitate to hire me. Super proud, in a new city, I started working there. And let me tell you, it was paradise. They had their own PHP CMS called DISCO (shit, I forgot what it stood for xD). They had the smartest engineers I had ever worked with. Every conversation, every question they answered, I felt enlightened. I am so grateful for all the patience and energy they invested in me. Everything I did before felt like toying around; this was actual Software Engineering. It was incredible.
It wasn’t just flowers and roses, though. It was a real job with even higher stakes. Sometimes it was a “work overtime creating 25 variations of shitty ad banners by hand in Photoshop that we need by tomorrow or the customer doesn’t pay” kind of situation.
We went through it all together as a team. It taught me a lot of resilience. Doing business is brutally difficult - a lesson I’d already started to learn. But overall, I learned tons, made friends for life, and the web really accelerated around this time: Scriptaculous, MooTools, jQuery, and Firefox with DevTools. It felt like the web was approaching a transformation.
What better time to completely switch technical domains?
I was fed up with seemingly building the same website in a different color again. I wanted more.
While the web being on the verge of big transformation, it was also the gold rush time of Apple with releasing the Appstore. Similar as with AI right now, you constantly heard about indie devs hitting the jackpot with a simple game or a small app. I wanted that, too.
So, on the side, I taught myself how to build an app with Objective-C on the first Mac I’d ever used. I made a small “Find the nearest gas station on your route” app, with the selling point: “You’ll save more money on your first refill than this app costs.” I still have some old screenshots.
lol, what a beauty.
In my defense, I had zero clue about mobile development. I just stitched together things from Stack Overflow and open-source libraries. But I actually had it in the App Store for multiple years. It made a few bucks, like, 200 in total, but I learned a ton.
The original goal, of course, was to get rich with my app and retire nope. I learned how difficult it is to bring an app to the App Store. Besides figuring out Apple’s certificate signing hell, it was close to running a business again (Sales, Marketing, Support etc.). Since it didn’t pop off, I used it to apply at BYTEPOETS. They were known to be one of the best and only App devs around. And I was glancing at them way before starting to build my own app and thought to myself: “Maybe one day I will manage to work there”. So ultimately feeling somewhat ready, I applied.
I wouldn’t have dared go there without having something to show for.
Long story short, they hired me. And there, it was the same thing all over again, just with different people and different tech. I learned tons of new things, worked on a fancy iMac, did Scrum it actually made sense and was fun, at least 50% of the time and found friends for life. Everything you could ask for. I always saw myself as a good allrounder, even working on multiple projects at the same time. At BYTEPOETS I really learned how to quickly adapt to a rapidly changing environment and aquired a lot of taste. Most of the apps we built required a backend and the whole engineering team nerded out like crazy using always the latest new tech. From Ruby on Rails, Docker, Laravel. It helped me refine my skills further.
A quick thought about working in an office
It’s kind of weird to say, but before COVID, there wasn’t even a discussion around remote work. Everyone was in the office all the time, no questions asked. It was normal and perfectly fine. It makes forming new relationships so much easier since you’re naturally exposed to more opportunities in life. Just being at home, not breaking out of your circle, is limiting ones full potential.
Fast forward
The Silicon Valley Jump
Graz was also the city where I first met a person who would introduce me to opportunities I couldn’t have even dreamed of. And I met him under circumstances I never would have expected.
That person was Armin Ronacher. Back then he wasn’t famous yet
We met at a house party for a mutual friend. Completely smashed and sweaty, in the early morning hours, we started talking about programming. Suddenly, the feeling of “I’m so drunk and tired, I just want to go home” transformed into the most energizing and elevating conversation I’d had in a long, long time. I knew immediately: Armin is a dude who knows his shit.
I have actually zero recollection of what we talked about… but I’m sure there was some programming involved.
Anyway, we kept in touch and became loose friends. We met for dinner a while later, and that was the first time he told me about his company, Sentry.
It sounded like a dream: a San Francisco startup, already making good money, hockey-stick growth; everything on the bingo card for an absolute dream job. It felt unachievable, as in: “I don’t even dare to ask him how I could join.”
Besides; They were only in SF and not hiring remotely. And I wasn’t planning to move abroad. I mean, I’d thought about it, but ultimately didn’t dare to; not for Sentry, but generally for the Valley.
Another while passes, and Armin shows up in some random news feed with the headline: “Österreicher bringt Silicon Valley nach Wien” (Austrian brings Silicon Valley to Vienna).
It felt surreal.
At this time, things had gotten stale for me again, and I was willing to take more risks. So I wrote to Armin and asked: “How can I convince you to give me a chance to join?”
It was a long back-and-forth, but Armin knew I’d been working on mobile for a while, and Sentry wanted to tap into that market. Somehow, the stars aligned. Armin, being a polyglot, could have done everything himself, but I guess I managed to annoy him for long enough that I really was motivated to help.
So they decided to interview me. I talked to Armin, Cramer, and Matt, doing interviews very similar to the ones we do today at Sentry. After it was over, I really wasn’t sure how I did. I don’t think I did great.
But somehow, for some reason, they said: “Let’s give him a chance.”
I couldn’t believe it. Sentry, the Silicon Valley company, gave Ingenieur Daniel Griesser the chance to work with them on their product. It was by far the biggest opportunity, the biggest challenge, the biggest jump I had ever taken. But with my current mood of “let’s go all-in and see what happens”, I was ready.
I started there without having written a single line of Python before. It was wild, honestly. What before felt like I had an organized job now felt like a bunch of nerds building their dream project and didn’t care about anything else. It was crazy chaotic and unorganized. The pace, the passion, the care, the knowledge, the impact, the tech; all of it was dimensions apart from what I’d experienced before. It was the best. All the meetings I had before were gone. I think I never wrote as much code in my life as the first few years at Sentry, I could only do what I love: Solve problems.
It’s been almost nine years now, and so many things have changed. I joined as an SDK Engineer for the iOS SDK. I first wrote it in Swift, thinking it was a good idea to bet on the future. But the ABI wasn’t stable yet so it was an awfully stupid idea.
So I rewrote it in Objective-C, reusing an existing codebase and making it a bit more “Sentry-like.” From there, I went on to work on, I think, practically every SDK Sentry supported at the time, in various degrees.
Sentry grew, became more and more successful, the team in Vienna grew, and my responsibilities grew. To where we are today.
Still, after almost nine years, I can say it’s the best job I’ve ever had, even though it’s very different from what it was. I love working with my team and the people here. I think it would be very difficult for me to find such another great opportunity ever again. This is a once in a lifetime situation and I cherish it.
I found friends for life, met and worked with people I once thought were unreachable and build and awesome product that is helping a ton of people.
Who knows what’s next in store for me.
Well… That escalated quickly.
I first sat down to play a video game, then suddenly felt the urge to write about my experience with AI and agentic coding, because it’s so crazy exciting right now.
I ended up writing what led me to this moment in life, in fast-forward.
My first long post about what got me here.
I had to skip over so many stories, lessons, people, and experiences that bubbled up while writing this. If I care enough, I might find the time to tell a few more of those stories.
Until then, thank you for spending your time reading this. To anyone else who felt inspired by my words, it would mean a ton if you reach out.
Cheers,
Daniel