A new job, and a very different kind of work
In August I started a new role: Chief Specialist for Digitalization at the Social Inspection under the National Agency for Social Protection. After years of building products — ERPs at InterRail, BookUp on the side — this is the first time my job is less "ship a feature" and more "keep a whole organization's digital side running."
It's been about two months. I've learned more about devices, networks and people than I expected, so here's what it actually looks like.
The tablets
A big part of the daily work happens on Android tablets. Which means somebody has to make sure every tablet has the right apps, the right versions and the right settings — and that somebody is now me.
You can't do that by walking around with a USB cable. The tablets are spread out, far from where I sit. So the answer is an MDM — mobile device management. We use Headwind MDM, an open-source, self-hosted one.
The idea is simple: every tablet runs the Headwind agent, and the agent listens to the server. On the server you group devices into configurations — which apps they should have, which settings, what's allowed and what's not. Change a configuration, and every tablet in it picks up the change on its own.
In practice that means:
- Installing apps remotely. A new app or a new version goes to the server once, and it rolls out to the tablets. Nobody has to touch a device.
- Device configuration and security policies. These are work tools, not personal phones, and the policies keep them that way.
- Monitoring. I can see which devices are online, what they're running, and which ones are behind.
- Usage analysis. Which apps actually get used, and where. Surprisingly useful when you're deciding what to support.
Watching an update land on tablets in places I've never been still feels a little bit like magic.
The lesson: with a fleet of devices, the hard part is never the ones that work. It's the few that are offline, out of storage, or stuck on an old version — and you need to be able to find those fast.
An ERP that 150+ people open every day
The other big piece is an ERP system that more than 150 people use daily. I've built ERPs before, but there's a difference between building one and being responsible for one that a whole organization depends on every morning.
When 150 people use something every day, small things stop being small:
- A slow page isn't "a bit slow" — it's 150 people waiting.
- A confusing button produces the same question from ten different people.
- Downtime isn't a ticket, it's work stopping.
So a lot of my time goes into the boring, important stuff: keeping Linux servers and databases healthy, running services in Docker so deployments are predictable, reading logs, and shipping changes carefully. Around it I build automations with Node-RED and Baserow — small flows that move data between systems so people don't have to retype it.
Door controllers in 13 regions
This one I didn't see coming. Employee entry and exit is recorded by Hikvision door controllers — and there are offices in 13 regions, each with its own controller keeping its own log.
A log sitting on a device in a regional office doesn't help anyone. My job was to manage those controllers and bring the entry/exit logs from all 13 regions into one place, where they can actually be used for attendance and reports.
What I learned:
- Hardware is slower to fix than software. If a controller's clock is wrong, every record from it is wrong. Time sync matters more than you'd think.
- Regional networks aren't your office network. Connections drop. Anything that collects data from devices has to handle gaps and catch up later, instead of assuming everything is always online.
- Entry/exit logs are personal data. Who can see them matters just as much as collecting them.
Integrations everywhere
On top of all that, the job is full of integrations with government platforms — MyGov, DMED, IHMA and 40+ others. Data that used to be requested and copied by hand now moves between systems automatically. It's the same feeling I had with the ERP work at InterRail: nobody will screenshot it, but people's days get shorter.
What changed for me
Building products, I mostly thought about code. Here I think about the whole chain: the tablet in someone's hands, the network in a regional office, the door controller on the wall, the server behind it all — and the 150 people who just want the ERP to open in the morning.
Two months in, I really like it. It's less glamorous than launching a product, but every fix is felt the next day by real people across the country. More notes soon.