Developer Spotlight: Maayan Arbiv

Published in

ekoEngineering

7 min readFeb 3, 2021

We’re delighted to start this new year with another article from our Developer Spotlight series featuring Maayan Arbiv.

Maayan has been programming with us for 7 years. She’s extremely dedicated to her work yet always makes time for coffee with her fellow devs (that’s us!). We’re excited to have her with us and for you to get to know her.

What’s your role here at eko, and what do you love most about it?

I’m a programmer, developer, or whatever you want to call it. What I love most about my job is the work itself. It forces me to think.

What’s fun about my job is that I love the people, which is the most important part. Beyond that, I really like our product. I worked on its core during my first years here at eko. It was super exciting and challenging, and most of the things we do today are built on top of that.

Being an eko dev is always interesting and challenging. You jump from one thing to the next, and it’s never dull. There’s always something to do, and because we work in an extreme ownership model, when you have a project, you build it from scratch; you plan it, design the architecture, talk to all the relevant people, and lead it from start to finish. It’s great because you get to see the full picture and everything you need to develop something, like QA or devops, for example. The more parts you see, the more you’re able to think for yourself. That’s the advantage of smaller companies, it’s really fun. And if it isn’t, you should be doing something else.

How long have you been working at eko?

I’ve been at eko for 7 years. One of eko’s most significant advantages is that people work here for a really long time, which isn’t very common with tech companies. It really resonates with potential candidates when we tell them that. I like coming to the office. I like talking to people and hanging out with them.

What did your typical workday look like in 2020?

Except for lockdowns, I kept coming to the office. We were so used to just sitting together and talking face-to-face whenever we had questions that when the first lockdown started, it took us a couple of weeks to adjust to this new situation of working from home and collaborating on Zoom. At first, things were a bit messy. But once we figured it out, we became very organized. Zoom forced us to work on a schedule, show up to and end meetings on time. For each new feature release, our CTO, Yuval Hofshy, sent a team-wide announcement so anyone could join the Zoom sync meetings if they wanted to.

I start my days early, and lockdowns made me begin even earlier. I usually sit down to work at 8:30, so I have about two hours of quiet time before communicating with anyone. When everyone worked remotely, we had a lot more meetings throughout the day. When those were done, I’d go back to productivity mode. Now that some of us are back at the office, we had to readjust the meetings’ frequency again, but we’re used to it by now. We needed to adapt to many changes lately, but that’s life, and we make the most of it.

Did anything change for the better?

Yes. Meetings became a lot more structured and organized. We also learned to be even more available for one another. I also loved reuniting with people at the office when the lockdowns ended. We really missed each other. That’s one thing COVID-19 hasn’t changed at all.

Three eko devs and their team lead (photo by Dafna Talmon)

How would you describe your job to a child?

Wow. I would probably start with an example of something that works. I showed Tasty to my 6-year-old niece. She made all the possible choices over and over again. I would explain that there is a sequence of actions that she can tell the computer to do according to its language. I’d say I spend most of my day writing words that are computer software commands so that it will do what I want it to do. For example, there’s a tool on our platform that lets anyone upload a video then add cool buttons to it to help them tell their story. The commands I wrote make that happen. But then I’d also say I spend most of my time getting angry at the computer for not doing what I want.

Tell us about a time when your input made an impact.

I have an excellent example. “Offlining” is what we internally call the process of making projects that are played using an active connection to the internet playable offline. I was responsible for making it work, especially for our CEO, who wanted to showcase our projects at events and presentations without depending on an active, stable network connection. It’s not really part of our core business, and no one properly checked that this feature worked because it wasn’t that important in our day-to-day work.

Projects always had to be “made offline” at the very last moment. It was something only developers knew how to do, and it was an annoying task every single time. I spoke with our CTO and convinced him that we should treat this just like any other product. So, he assigned an “offline” project manager. Now, anyone, not just the developers, can make any project work offline.

What was your most challenging experience as a developer?

My most challenging experience as a developer was what I loved working on most — our player’s core.

I was part of the team responsible for re-writing our old Flash/ActionScript player as a JavaScript player. We have several audio/video playback engines, and my colleague and I had ownership of the iOS engine. It was challenging because I needed to have a deep understanding of HLS, the protocol we used, and its inner workings. Then I got to improve the experience and performance of our iOS app, and that was even more challenging. I had to handle the bytes you were downloading and understand everything that was going on in the browser and the OS.

I call it the hardest because I also had to test it differently. I could test the previous engine in Safari, but here I needed to test specifically within the context of an iOS app. I had to generate the audio and video streams and deal with things at a very low level, plus the app layer, which made things more complicated. We needed to work with WebSockets, and that’s something I never really did before. I felt like I had an opportunity to understand things on a much deeper level, which was very interesting.

What’s your most memorable facepalm moment?

It was just a few months after I started working here. I was working on the iOS engine and had a Mac because I could only test on Safari. I put down my coffee, hit the glass, the coffee spilled all over the computer, and it immediately shut down. Back then, Macs were really expensive in Israel.

Now, if it were my personal work computer, that would’ve been one thing, but I was just borrowing it for testing purposes. I wanted to disappear off the face of the earth. We opened the computer, let the coffee drip, dried it, cleaned it, and put it next to a heater. It started working again! We keep it at the office to this day as a historical artifact. It was a dark moment in my professional life, and it happened before my morning coffee! A terrible way to start the day.

What are you passionate about? What do you love doing (besides writing code)?

I really like going to see live music. But, since there aren’t any concerts at the moment, I’m currently into binge-watching Netflix. I just finished The Fall with Gillian Anderson; I love her on that show. I’m also an amateur drummer. Eko is where I got the push to start learning to play the drums.