“I am Robert Kuunders and I work as a Senior ILIAS consultant and system administrator for Future Learning. I will briefly tell you about a working day at this beautiful company.”

Maintaining the servers

“A large number of servers are maintained for our customers on which the differently configured versions of ILIAS run. Both the servers running the Ubuntu system and the ILIAS instances with the plugins need maintenance. Part of that maintenance is automatic, such as monitoring and making database backups. Another part is done manually. The manual maintenance has to be prepared, performed and checked, which can be scheduled as work. However, if there is an alarm during the monitoring, then that work comes in between, sometimes in the middle of the night or at the weekend.”

But also a lot of research!

“The other part of my job is mainly research. Find out exactly how a certain functionality in a customer environment, our website or other system works, or should work, and can be explained. If there’s something wrong, I’ll see if there’s another way to achieve the same thing. If there is a new technique that Future Learning will use, I am also the person who researches this to adopt in our portfolio. We record as much knowledge as possible in our helpdesk system Zendesk and in our internal knowledge base, in ILIAS of course!”