Employee Spotlight: Matt Garofalo

Meet Matt.

Hi, everyone. My name's Matt Garofalo. I'm a cloud engineer at Trava Security and I am based out of PB, Massachusetts.

In your words, what is your role at Trava.

So as a Cloud Engineer, I handle a lot of the provisioning and management of our infrastructure, roles and permissions of our services, and I also play a part in a lot of DevOps work. So building automation and making sure our pipelines run smoothly and the deployment process of our apps also go smoothly. I do a lot of different things as a lot of people have to call it.

Describe Trava in 3 words.

I would say the first one is exciting because I think some of the stuff that we're working on, the stuff we're trying to achieve is really unique to not only the market, but it's also an interesting problem that we're trying to address for a lot of different people. So I think it's an exciting opportunity to work here and work on this product with this company.

Also, challenging is one, because I think you could always say if it's easy, everyone would do it. So, a lot of the stuff that we're trying to do, to make life better for other people. It's still a hard journey to get there. But we work as a company to overcome those challenges.

And the last three is fun. We take our work seriously, but we also don't want to take ourselves seriously. So there's always a good vibe going around from the employees and other coworkers.

Where is your happy place?

My happy place. It would be to put myself on a golf course, a really nice golf course just to myself or with my friends and just a beautiful day. Or honestly, just in my backyard by my pool with my dog and my girlfriend. I think both places are home to me.

If you could give your 13 year old self advice, what would it be?

I would think it would be, do something that you love. I feel like I know a lot of people who go into occupations are more for the name rather than actually doing the occupation. So find something that you enjoy doing day to day because then you'll never hate having to go to work every day.

What is your favorite motivational quote?

Not to be a dork, but from Star Wars, I think, when Yoda says,

Is a pretty motivational quote. Don't give it a half assed effort. Go in, go all in if you can't do it, that's great. If you can't do it, move on. Don't sit there, half in half out. Give it full effort and you'll succeed.

What has been your favorite project at Trava?

I would say it's the one I'm just currently working on. It's transitioning a lot of our infrastructure over to a more private configuration. It touches a lot of how our deployment processes work, how our authentication works, what the overall changes to how our apps talk to another and the internet work. So there's a lot of moving pieces and it's a really challenging, but also very unique problem that I'm addressing.

Cats or dogs?

I am a dog person. My dog is a two and a half year old rescue. He's a pit, lab, husky mix.

What is your definition of success?

It's when you're proud to put the work that you've completed in front of others. Now, obviously you'll have iterations if you want to make improvements. So I make sure I check off all my boxes. There might be areas for improvement, but to get the most value out of it means to put in the amount of time to get to 80, 90, 100% of what you think is completed work and then be ready to show that with other people. Again, obviously there'll be improvements that come after, but my definition of success is getting to the point where you're proud and confident to show off your work.