Martin Willi

along with onway – how long have you been on board?

I joined in 2015 and ever since then, I’ve really valued the people and the solution-oriented culture at onway.

What tasks does your role as Software Engineer include?

Our small but powerful team is developing its own operating system for mobile routers. While we may be relying on Linux and open source, we are still developing a surprising amount ourselves. Moreover, I design and implement communication protocols, for back-end systems, among others.

What do you particularly enjoy about your job?

Within the industry, a lot of software is “slapped together” from existing components without really understanding it all. At onway, we develop even large projects from scratch. I find this very fulfilling since it allows me to learn something new every day. We now also have a fantastic, well-maintained software base with which even stubborn problems can be elegantly solved in no time.

Which technologies and topics do you come across in your job?

We primarily develop in the time-honoured C, as it is still suitable for embedded systems and our open-source components are mainly based on it. As far as our Linux base is concerned, we are keeping a very close eye on the latest developments. For instance, we are using eBPF for networking and our own container runtime for productive workloads and as a basis for testing at various levels. What’s more, we also use exciting technologies that we have developed ourselves. Be it a message broker for a service-oriented architecture on embedded systems, our own modem stack or even a sophisticated management protocol to configure and manage large router fleets.

What professional expertise are you bringing to the table?

After my studies, I spent many years developing the VPN software strongSwan, which is also a key onway component. During that time, I not only honed my C development skills as part of large projects, but I also gained a lot of experience relating to networking and cryptography. This is something I can build on today.

What are your plans for the future, what do you definitely want to achieve with onway?

I want to build product software that can be configured and managed comfortably from the cloud – even across thousands of devices. I am also trying to develop solutions that don’t have to hide next to those of well-known industry giants, while working at a Swiss SME. I think we’re going down a very exciting road here.

Since our product security is very important to me, I also want to stay up to date here so that I can guarantee this security in the long term. It would certainly be exciting to introduce the Rust programming language as a more resilient foundation, even if we cannot convert our own code base with several hundred thousand lines of code overnight!

Why onway? To me, working at onway means…

...working for a company that places a lot of trust in me as an employee and allows us a great deal of freedom within our team to specifically solve real-world problems. We have the privilege of developing software on a long-term yet sustainable basis, which unfortunately is no longer a matter of course nowadays.

Any final words?

“Technology is becoming increasingly complex. Yet at the same time, it is becoming increasingly fascinating, if you are tempted to understand it.”

11/2022