Ready. Set. Spark: QA Engineer, Damian Vonapartis
Ready, Set, Spark puts our team members in the spotlight with some rapid-fire questions. Get to know our team better and if our culture sparks your interest, check out our Careers page to see if we are a good fit for you.
What’s your name?
Damianos Stefanos Vonapartis, but everyone calls me Damian.
What’s your title at Spark?
QA Engineer.
Where do you live?
Malaga, Spain.
What’s your favourite food?
Mushroom Garlic Pizza (don't be stingy on the mushrooms; keep them coming!)
Favourite track from the ’00s.
I can't pick one track, but I can pick an album. System of a Down: Toxicity - my favourite! Honestly, I think the '00s were the last time people really listened to entire albums. Spotify has changed that now, right?
Have you travelled this year? If not, where do you plan to go?
Have I travelled! Well, quite a bit. I recently just got back from Galicia, and have visited many villages on the western coast. And of course, the beautiful Santiago de Compostela.
What does your day-to-day work look like at Spark?
When I am in the office, I start my day with a 'cafe con leche' and fill up with some breakfast from the Spark kitchen. Almost immediately, this is followed up by the daily standup with one of Spark's current customers.
The rest of my day can be anything from creating test plans, implementing agreed-upon tests, doing heavy research, and using AWS services to assist my team with QA. Also, some additional meetings to determine if any critical changes are needed in the project. My day-to-day also occasionally includes lunch with my coworkers and, of course, documenting my hours.
What’s your favourite way to wind down after a long day?
Well, I’ve been working on some side projects. I’m also watching 'Manhunt: Unabomber' and 'Mindhunters' on Netflix.
Side projects... interesting! What are you up to?
I am currently developing a directory enumeration tool using python. It is meant to be the spiritual successor to the classic 'dirbuster' and a competitor to 'gobuster'.
These tools are at a high level very similar. They allow you to use HTTP verbs (Especially GET) to GET the subdirectories of almost any webpage given a URL/URI (https://www.mywebsite.com/) and a wordlist [robots.txt, drivers, old, admin etc].
The program automates the concatenation of the URL/URI with the words in the wordlist, attempts to access each generated URL (ie, https://www.mywebsite.com/robots.txt), and returns the status code of each response. It also scales using multithreading. This is especially useful when considering that a big corporation would want to test 50000 possible URLs. No one should have to do this manually with a browser. This program would allow you to do this in under 5 minutes.
Spark is a fully remote company with an office in Dublin and Malaga. How do you find work-life balance?
It's good. I enjoy the freedom of coming into the office any day I want. It is a freedom I appreciate greatly. I think Spark is the first company I work for that puts its money where its mouth is and follows through on work-life balance improvements.
If you could do any other job at Spark, which one would it be?
Offensive Security Researcher.
How do you find Spark fits within the tech world currently?
I think it has found a really snug niche. Spark specialises in data-oriented projects/platforms due to the expertise the team offers, yes. But I think it is also effective due to the team's AWS skills. It gives us that extra edge.
Zoom or Slack?
Slack. But I am more of an E2EE messenger guy (Signal, Session etc.).
Last article you read?
The Greek government's illegal wiretapping of opposition party members.
It's good. I enjoy the freedom of coming into the office any day I want. It is a freedom I appreciate greatly. I think Spark is the first company I work for that puts its money where its mouth is and follows through on work-life balance improvements.
Fill in the blank. Spark is......?
Ambitious!