How Networking and Effective Learning Brought Bambang From North Sumatera to Mekari
Having been with Mekari for almost 3 years, Bambang Sinaga is one of those engineers often assigned to solve difficult problems with code. He helped us rewrite Sleekr’s core system from Laravel to Ruby on Rails, and now he’s working on rewriting one of Talenta’s most used features. Let’s get to know his journey on becoming an adept and reliable engineer.
Bambang, who usually goes by Bams, came from Simanindo, a Subdistrict located on an island in the middle of Lake Toba, North Sumatra. Early on in his life, he didn’t have a head start or strong interest in technology. Where most adept engineers start their programming journey in high school, Bams started a bit later as it’s difficult to learn a lot about computers when your school only has 3 computers. Bams went on to pursue his associate degree in software engineering after finding out that one of his relatives managed to work abroad after getting his diploma.
After getting his associate’s degree in software engineering, Bams and 9 of his friends built a software development studio in his hometown where he worked on several video game projects as a developer. While it didn’t last long, he learned a lot about stakeholder management and understanding briefs from clients.
Bams is a huge believer in networking as he keeps in touch with his fellow alumni. Aside from exchanging knowledge and experiences, it made it possible for him to land a job in one a well-known wedding marketplace, and in doing so helped him move from North Sumatra to Jakarta. From then onwards, he keeps challenging himself as a software engineer to learn and improve.
“Being a great software engineer means you have to learn quickly and constantly. You have to be strong in your basics [data structures, algorithms, and etc.] as it is the same in most programming languages and be familiar with the quirks of each language you use. While it took me 3 months to get used to the tech stack in my first job, it only took me 3 weeks in my current one.”
Currently, he’s with us busy working on making Talenta, our HRIS product, easier to write unit tests for and maintain. In order to make Talenta more modular, Bams and his team have to rewrite some of the code and integrate Attendance (a standalone attendance product) within Talenta. Because this feature is heavily used, one wrong step can make the app unusable. However, we have zero worries since Bams and his team are on it.
The takeaways
Bams told us the key to a happy and empowered engineering team is a regular, meaningful, 1-on-1 session where you can talk with leaders (or subordinates if you’re a leader) on what kind of challenges everyone enjoys facing. When asked about the key to being an adept and reliable engineer, he told us: master the basics, learn fast, and learn often.
