“Actually, There are 3 Things I Hate About Tech”
Let’s give Andreas, Head of Engineering Tokopedia, a chance to spill the beans on how he ‘really’ feels about tech.
5 years working in Tokopedia and leading 2 teams does not guarantee that Andreas, Head of Engineering Tokopedia, had an interest in technology from the start. He reflected a lot and developed himself as he led his team, Buyer Growth Platform and Risk Management. This time, Andreas didn’t want to talk about his vision and mission, or all the positive things in his personal and professional life. He thought it would be refreshing to share what he really feels about tech; why not? Let’s give him a chance.
1. “I doubted that I was interested in tech”
Initially, it never occurred to Andreas to jump into the field of technology. His level of knowledge about the overall field, especially coding, was little when he was in school. But before entering college, Andreas received advice from his friends to take a leap of faith and try to major in Information and Technology (IT).
Entering his first semester, Andreas was honestly not too bothered nor serious about learning the lessons and doing well in the classes. But the more classes he attended, the more he realized that he could not continue to ignore his future. From there, he was determined to be more disciplined and study hard.
“Entering semesters 2 and 3, I began to think about the fate of my future. I had to get myself together and start studying the field that I was meant to be in. I started to be disciplined, not only in attending lectures but in everything else. I became more diligent, seldom skipping classes and also repeating the lessons in my free time.”
From then on, Andreas discovered “the art of IT” as something exciting, challenging and continuously evolving. As a typical problem solver, Andreas thrives on feeling challenged to dig deeper about technology. So, he went all-in by joining an organization at his university. There, he began to develop and refine his skills by participating in various activities.
For example, Andreas participated in Imagine Cup 2013 to create and develop games for the Windows 8 Hackathon Competition. In the following year, he also became a Junior Programmer in charge of creating a website system for Binus Marketing Intelligence and an online admissions platform for Binus International School’s front-end and back-end. This became only the beginning of his pathway into the field of technology.
2. “My role was not what I want”
Speaking of technology, Andreas certainly has specific field preferences. Initially, he liked Android and iOS. What’s the reason? “Of course, because it’s cool!,” Andreas answered. According to him, if we were mastering Android and iOS, we can develop applications directly from scratch and can be sure that it will provide high-quality user experience.
That’s what brought Andreas to apply to Tokopedia as a Mobile Engineer. Still, his hopes were crushed when he was offered another role, “The funny thing is, I applied to Tokopedia for a Mobile Engineer position, but my destiny was different. I was accepted as a Back-end Engineer.”
But somehow, like the saying “love grows by habit”, Andreas started to like back-end engineering, even more so than mobile and front-end engineering. Again, that’s because Andreas is a problem-solving lover. He loves to challenge his technical skills. He finally felt that the back-end was a very suitable role because it was central to everything, from logic to performance.
In the back-end, he began to realize one thing, that the knowledge that every engineer must know is infrastructure and monitoring. Not only coding and developing, but they have to see the server directly and the components in it. It makes engineers build better apps if they know the root cause, how it works, the reason why the server is malfunctioning among other things.
“So if you ask me again now about my favorite field of technology, I will answer: back-end and performance scalability at Tokopedia.”
3. “I have to stay up late during many promos and events”
As a team in a technology company in Indonesia, Andreas’s journey has required him to traverse a number of significant events and projects, such as Ramadan Ekstra, Tap-Tap Mantap, Tokopedia Anniversary, among others. As a back-end team in the buyer growth tribe, he and his team are required to standby to create voucher codes, as well as keep traffic and servers from being down.
“If there is an event tomorrow, we all have to get ready to make large amounts of voucher codes and maintain traffic. On several occasions, we have to standby at the office and can’t attend the event. Sometimes it makes us feel a bit sad but learn a lot. Most of the time, the person who gets credit for the success of an event is the drafter, but actually, the real heroes are the people behind the scenes, all the teams that make the project happen, including the Engineering team.”
Andreas is proud to be leading a team of 40 engineers as this gives him high ownership. Although sometimes the root cause does not come from the Engineering team, they still have to maintain the Tokopedia App for 24 hours, “We will work incredibly hard to give the best for our users.”
As Andreas has gone through many difficult challenges and solved a lot of significant problems, he felt that his team has become accustomed to developing high-quality products. “Most people can certainly make products that people are accustomed to using, but to change the mindset to create a functional, scalable and robust system that holds massive traffic is a different matter. Especially during Ramadan Ekstra. In 2018, we did experience some downtime due to very high user traffic. But, we learn from our mistakes, and make the next preparations 1,000 times better. Finally in 2019, we managed to operate the event with zero downtime. That’s one achievement that makes me and my team very proud.”
Andreas will also share more about some of the projects he handles at Tokopedia during START. Some of them include revealing how his team achieved more than 200K Requests per Second (RPS) in less than one month during Ramadan Ekstra and how Andreas and his team tried to ‘beat’ the Tokopedia system itself as preparation to withstand a high number of traffic users.
“It’s not only about knowledge and experience but also about the willingness to get out of your comfort zone and start making technology breakthroughs.”
About START
START is Tokopedia’s first technology summit that will uncover the various technological innovations that Tokopedia has made in the past decade. From Scalability, Data Science, and Core Engineering; this first-ever tech summit by Tokopedia presents a vast array of topics on Tokopedia’s technology breakthroughs and innovations. Discover more about START through www.start-summit.com.
