Turning a new page: saying farewell to eko dev, Divya Mahadevan
At the end of the month, we’ll be saying goodbye to Divya Mahadevan, one of our NYC-based developers and an excellent person regardless. Divya has been accepted to the Digital and Social Change Masters program at the University of Oxford, so we know she’ll literally be making the world a better place.
We took this chance to sit down and talk to Divya about her 2 years and her many contributions here at eko, her many passions, her future plans, and wish her the absolute best in all her future endeavors.
What’s your role here at eko, and what do you love most about it?
I’m a developer at eko, and I’ve been working here for almost 2 years. I think what I love most is that I get to work on a wide variety of problems and work with many different people both inside and outside of the company. I’ve worked with people from Walmart, Tasty, and even Fox broadcast engineers. Within the company, I’ve worked across the stack, from Sonorous, an open source WebAudio library, to a content management API to the player controls UI. I think it’s cool that everyone here works on so many different products — it means that everyone has a stake in everything and really cares about the work we’re doing.
How has your workday changed since the pandemic? Did anything change for the better?
In a lot of ways, my job didn’t really change that much. Even before the pandemic, I could be considered a “remote worker” since there are only 3 devs in NYC, with the rest in Tel Aviv. The majority of my meetings were over Zoom ~before it was cool~. There are definitely pain points with remote work, and I think our entire team grew to appreciate and address those pain points more when we all entered lockdown. When everyone is remote, you end up getting included more in impromptu conversations that you would’ve had no clue were happening otherwise.
What will you do next?
In the fall, I’ll be attending the University of Oxford as part of their Digital and Social Change Masters program. I’ll be studying how we can use technology to reduce inequities in education. Given the amount of Zoom school that’s been happening this past year, I think it’s a fascinating time to take a step back and critically examine how technology can be used in schools and its effect on student learning.
But if you’re looking for me over the summer, you’ll probably find me at the beach. :)
How would you describe your job to a child?
Imagine you were watching your favorite show, but you could decide how your favorite character behaves. I help build videos that let you do that! There are 2 big buckets of problems you encounter when making videos like this: “how do you make a video that has choices in it?” and “how do you watch it once you’re done making it?”. The technology I build answers those 2 questions.
Tell us about a time when your input made an impact.
Walmart Paint Finder immediately comes to mind. Paint Finder is our latest experience, which helps you decide which color paint you should buy to paint a room. Normally, when building an eko video, you have a different video for each choice you make. So, if I have 3 different paint color options (i.e., red, green, blue), I would normally need to supply 3 different videos (1 video with red walls, 1 with green walls, 1 with blue… you get the idea). In Paint Finder, you have 5 different room options (bedroom, bathroom, etc.), 3 different styles for each room, and 48 different paint colors to choose from. 5 x 3 x 48 = 720. That’s a lot of videos!
I have a computer graphics background, which means I love working with shaders and filters and other low-level WebGL graphics-y things. I had already been messing around with building a chroma key (green screening) algorithm that was compatible with our player technology. This seemed like the perfect solution for Paint Finder; instead of having a different video for each paint color, you could supply 1 video — and my algorithm could programmatically change the color of the walls. So, instead of 720 different videos, you would only need 15. Much better!
What was your most challenging experience as a developer?
I came to eko with very, very little web experience. Until then, I worked as an iOS developer and never spent much time working with web technologies. I was really nervous because there are so many different aspects to web technology, and all of it was foreign to me (Docker? Never heard of her. AWS? Witchcraft, as far as I was concerned.) I didn’t even really know JavaScript before I started. It’s been ~2 years, and I’ve learned so much. I know I still have a long way to go before considering myself an AWS expert, but I feel much more confident about my ability to learn everything I need to.
What are you passionate about? What do you love doing (besides writing code)?
Ha. I think I have too many passions. I’m passionate about equitable access to education and love working with kids, so I’m currently teaching intro computer science to a class of high school students in Brooklyn. I love cooking, so I’m working on a cookbook of my grandmothers’ recipes. I love art and animation, so I’m always drawing or modeling/shading/rendering scenes. I love being active and exploring new places, so you can catch me wandering around Brooklyn most weekends.
When did you discover your love of teaching?
My love of teaching stems from my love of storytelling. I think there’s something so special in the exchange between storyteller and listener, both so engaged and captivated by the story. At some point, I realized that teaching is just another form of storytelling. My history teacher in high school was also the drama director, and his animated portrayal of American history made it much more exciting to learn. From then on, whenever I had study groups with my friends, I would try to turn whatever we were learning into a story. It certainly helped things stick in my brain more. In college, I was a teaching assistant for an introductory computer science class for 3 years. As cheesy as it sounds, I really loved seeing the “aha” moment when something finally clicked for my students.
As an aside, I think the reason I love teaching is the same reason why I applied to eko in the first place. I love this idea of tech creating new forms of storytelling and storytelling creating new forms of tech. Eko really encompasses that idea, and I can’t wait to see how it pushes the boundaries of storytelling further.
What’s your most memorable work-related facepalm moment?
Hmm…There was one that happened a few weeks ago. I was working on this bug where the video kept flickering. I spent days agonizing over how to fix it, and nothing was working. I finally asked Tomer, our Director of R&D, for help, and within 5 minutes, he was like, “have you tried commenting out this one line?” The line in question even had a comment above it that said something like “black frame flicker might occur.” That ended up not being the issue, but still — big facepalm moment.
If you could choose anyone alive or dead to be your mentor, who would you choose?
Tough question! The first name that comes to mind is Ada Lovelace, who is credited as one of the first computer programmers. She had an interesting life from the get-go: her father was Lord Byron (a poet…among other things), and her mother, Lady Byron, was a mathematician. She carried both of these identities with her throughout her life and considered herself a “poetical scientist.” She’s largely credited as the first person to think about what computers could do outside of crunching numbers. She raised a lot of questions about the relationships among technology, society, and individuals. I think she’d be fascinating to talk to and learn from.
What will you miss most about eko?
Hands down, the people (to both questions). Everyone here has such an interesting background and is so passionate about the work they do. Moreover, there are no egos- — you can walk up to anybody and ask any question, and they’ll be happy to answer. Particularly on the dev team, I think there’s a sort of fearlessness that I haven’t experienced before. Like, if you have an idea — even if it’s something radical like “Hey, let’s rewrite this entire module,” or “Hey, let’s try out this new technology and completely overhaul our existing workflows” — nobody will stop you from trying it out and making it happen!
I’ll definitely miss that fearless and supportive environment and working with all of these insanely genius developers. I came to eko not knowing anything about web development and learned so much about how to be a better developer and coworker from this team. I know I’ll carry these lessons with me into the future, and I can’t wait to see what comes next for eko.
Thank you, Divya. We know this is such an amazing opportunity for you, but we still can’t believe you’re leaving.
There’s a pair of big shoes to fill on our dev team…if you want to try them on, get in touch with us here.
