BigCommerce Employee Spotlight: Lucian Villaseñor

Welcome to the BigCommerce Employee Spotlight. Each month, we’ll chat with an employee who works on the BigCommerce product. These are the folks behind the scenes who are crafting the BigCommerce developer experience, from SDKs and APIs to themes and documentation. Discover what they’re building, their tools of the trade, and learn about the technologies they’re passionate about.

Hi Lucian, Tell me about your path to BigCommerce.

In 2006, I moved from San Antonio to Austin to attend the University of Texas. I was lucky enough to have a robotics program in my school district which lit a fire in me to pursue Mechanical Engineering. Unfortunately, I was lacking in formal math skills and couldn’t get past the classes designed to weed out students. I fell into Mexican American studies and after floating around for a few years it seemed like I had finally found where I fit in at the University.

During that time, I worked at a call center that managed the helpdesk for multiple Internet Service Providers. While my work mostly consisted of walking people through turning their modem/router off and on, I gained an understanding of some basic networking concepts. The most useful concept was learning how your ISP will issue a Wide Area Network IP address, and behind that, you can have multiple Local Area Network IPs assigned from your router. Meaning if you have multiple people in an apartment or office using the same internet connection, all the traffic will seem like it is coming from one address. This information proved to be very useful in the future when troubleshooting and investigating who changed what on a BigCommerce store.

After dropping out of UT, I reluctantly got back into the tech support field and began working at a web hosting provider. It was still call center work but it was more challenging and I was exposed to technologies and software that I had never used previously. I enjoyed learning how the Domain Name System works. DNS is what translates the human-readable addresses we type in our browsers to the unique address of the resource we are trying to get to online. Configuring DNS incorrectly can cause a store to be down for hours. Not because it’s hard to fix — but because you have to wait for changes made to propagate throughout the Internet.

While I enjoyed what I was learning in my web hosting gig, I didn’t see the job going anywhere. One morning I woke up and just didn’t have the will to work for that organization any further. After emailing my letter of resignation, I immediately applied to work at BigCommerce. Several of my previous coworkers had already made the change and loved the mission and culture at BC.

Now, five years later — I’ve served in three different roles within the Client Success department and am about to join the Engineering team as a Site Reliability Engineer.

What do you work on? What does a typical day look like for you?

For the past 2 years I’ve worked as a Product Support Engineer. We primarily troubleshoot the most complicated issues impacting BigCommerce merchants and their customers. We also serve as subject matter experts of the product and answer questions and provide feedback for various internal teams. These questions can range from theorizing a solution via our API to help a Sales rep close a deal, assisting front line Support agents to figure out why a store is down, testing a new feature Product wants to roll out, or working with our Technical Operations team when we have platform-wide issues.

My favorite kind of issues involve investigating who did what on a store, like a detective. As I learned more about how our product worked and figured out how to view our internal logs, I was able to quickly discern who was responsible for making a particular change. It was the colonel_mustard API account in the v2/orders endpoint using a DELETE request.

Sometimes issues aren’t that clear cut and you have to get creative with the troubleshooting. While frustrating at times, issues like that gave me the opportunity to flex my problem-solving skills. An example that comes to mind was an issue involving the BigCommerce for WordPress plugin which was newly released at the time.

For some reason the API connection between the plugin and a store would disconnect.The only remedy was to generate a new set of API credentials and use those on the WordPress site, which was only temporary as the problem would inevitably crop up again. I couldn’t find a pattern or commonalities between the stores involved as it seemed to randomly occur on my WordPress site as well. One day as I was looking into the plugin settings for other reasons, I noticed the browser asked if I wanted to save an updated password even though I didn’t do anything involving updating a username or password.

I used a technique that makes the password visible and noticed it was the password I commonly use for personal logins, which I had never typed into these text fields. That’s when a lightbulb went off in my head and I realized my browser was autofilling those fields with incorrect information. I informed our developers and they were able to update the plugin to stop updating the credentials unintentionally.

What is an important problem that BigCommerce is solving?

The ecommerce industry is constantly changing. That can encompass everything from advancements in Internet technology, business practices and even changes in public opinion. We move very fast, so much so that I think there are instances in which we end up tripping over ourselves. I’ve chatted with coworkers on this topic and we generally come to the realization that if we didn’t move at this speed, our merchants, as well as ourselves, would fall behind the competition.

The new features we are constantly delivering and iterating upon enable our merchants to reach out to greater audiences and sell their products on markets they may have never previously considered. From that perspective, I think the work we do towards looking to the future in order to keep us relevant in the industry is the most important work we do.

What projects are you most passionate about building at BigCommerce?

For several months, I’ve helped with the development of our BigCommerce for WordPress plugin. We’ve partnered with Modern Tribe, a digital agency that has experience with WordPress and in conjunction with newly built API’s, we are able to deliver a solution that lets shoppers browse your product catalog and checkout on a WordPress site. The development of the plugin is one step in a bigger vision to deliver “Channels” to merchants’ stores which allows them to create and manage multiple storefronts. Over the past few months, it’s been exciting to help lay the groundwork for that aspect of the platform as we continue to iterate upon the plugin.

What’s the best career advice you’ve been given?

This may seem like common sense but the best advice I’ve been given is to simply reach out and talk to the folks on the team you are interested in. On more than one occasion I’ve had a conversation with a team or manager I was interested in working under and after I got a better idea of what they did or what was expected of me I realized I preferred where I was at the time. At the very least you are putting yourself on the radar and can start building bridges that may help with your next career move.

What’s next for you in your career?

Right now, I’m focused on soaking up as much knowledge as I can in my new role as a Site Reliability Engineer. I’m genuinely interested in learning how our infrastructure works and how to manage these systems. I’ve always had a bigger picture kind of perspective and I’m now in a position where I can influence the direction of the platform. I believe that the product knowledge I’ve garnered over the years will enable me to provide solutions to some of the longstanding problems and everyday annoyances that impact our merchants, as well as BigCommerce.

We’d like to thank Lucian for sharing his time with us and giving us a look into his day-to-day at BigCommerce. Have a question for Lucian? Reach out in the comments below.