An exclusive talk with Loship CTO: “Reduce the flashiness of technology and bring it back to where it is.” — Nguyen Ngoc Thinh.

Bài viết này có ngôn ngữ Tiếng Việt.

Back in 2017, the Loship food delivery app was officially launched by a team of young Vietnamese engineers and tech talent. The app has quickly gained much attention from Vietnamese customers due to the high-quality service and exceptional technology, which is undoubtedly on par with other regional competitors.

Fast forward to the present time, Loship has evolved into delivery and hyper-local e-commerce platform. The technology systems, therefore, have transformed continuously and expanded in both depth and width to effectively cater to massive business needs. It hasn’t been a long evolution, but hidden in it are a lot of effort, contribution, and thorough dedication of the whole Tech team at Lozi.

In this exclusive talk, sit down with Nguyen Ngoc Thinh, Chief Technology Officer, the “brain” behind each technological advance of Lozi. Listen to Thinh talking about his perspectives on tech, how tech affects business growth, as well as his dream and journey from the beginning to where Loship is heading next.

Hey, can you share a bit of your story? Which brought you to Lozi?

My journey with Lozi has started since the very first days. In the summer of 2013, when I was in the 3rd year of University, I received a call from a friend, inviting me to join Lozi. After that, we had an appointment with Trung CEO to discuss this opportunity in more detail.

Back then, all I knew about Lozi was a food review platform, which was quite a fun side project to work on. However, after the first meeting with Trung, hearing him explain his vision, big dreams, and aspirations of developing a technology product of Vietnamese people, I came to realize that Lozi was indeed an opportunity that I couldn’t miss. And that’s how my journey at Lozi began.

The day I joined Lozi, there were only five people in the Saigon-based office. I was responsible for building a tool to support features and functions on the website, such as processing restaurant addresses or customer review posts. After six months, I decided to suspend my work at Lozi to prioritize my study, leaving it all to fate. A year later, after completing the University program, I returned to Lozi and continued my chapter there.

Why did you decide to leave Lozi after six months? And what was the main reason that brought you back?

Talk about the reason why I joined Lozi first. The first and most important thing is the humans, including all the friends and partners who had accompanied me from the very beginning — those exceptionally energetic and visionary people, those balls of fire. They brought along values that got me overwhelmed in many aspects.

Second, it’s the product. Back in the early days, I might not fully understand the Lozi products inside and out. Still, I realized this was a platform that created direct value for the community and was able to make a significant impact. Third, I wanted to have new experiences outside the school grounds, and Lozi was a great opportunity.

After six months of working, there was a problem arising. Back then, I was only a third-year university student with little practical experience, so the value I contributed to the company was not to the extent that I expected. This led me to the decision of leaving Lozi and returning to school to finish the program. Afterward, I applied for an internship at a global tech company to grasp more practical work experiences. This was when I equipped myself with a more detailed and multi-dimensional perspective on how the world out there is operating, how the startup life is, and how Lozi is. The pieces started to fall into place, things became more apparent to me, and I knew exactly what I could do upon my return to Lozi.

During the break year, my thoughts and feelings still lingered at Lozi. I still kept in touch with people there, constantly updating work, and exploring new developments. It felt like I had always been a part of Lozi; much to the extent that a brother in the core team at that time even commented on me like: “Thinh is a person who didn’t stay in Lozi but never left Lozi.”

Regarding the reason for my staying with Lozi, it only revolves around two elements of humans and products. As for the human side, people come and go, but the right ones will always stay, and the fires of passion will always burn in each person who stays. As for the product side, it’s a little different from what I used to think earlier. Now I have a better, more apparent idea of the impact of the product I’m creating on the world out there.

Lozi’s continuous growth prospects bring along a range of learning opportunities, meaningfully contributing to create value for society. And I myself can receive values from there.

What does it mean to be a CTO of Loship?

I started taking over the role of CTO at Lozi in July 2016 when Lozi has gradually transformed itself into Loship. My job in this position? First thing first, it’s coding, of course! I spend lots of my time in a day coding, simply because it’s my favorite. But as a CTO, I’ll code in a much more different way than before — faster and three times more efficient. I’m forced to have a broader perspective when writing code as every line of code would directly impact the whole business, not just a few small features.

Second, I focus on optimizing business performance through wise technology investments. A CTO is required to pay a lot of attention not only to bugs, tech questions, and architecture but also to all aspects of a product and operational needs. Third, it’s the story of tech team building and management, ensuring a critical link between technology and business goals. It’s like figuring out the right balance between three fields: Tech, Product & Business.

To me, people in tech are never enough, and a CTO still has to code as usual. I conceive that when you leave the code and focus on other things, you won’t be able to understand the problematic aspects of the product. Later, when the team expands, and we have enough people to handle each product segment, I’ll reduce my time spent on coding to give priority to the management and optimization aspects.

How has your life changed after becoming the CTO? Your views on work-life balance?

I myself find no difference. I was very passionate about coding back then and still retain a high level of passion until now. The nature of my work has changed slightly, but overall, my life is almost the same — I’m still working 12 hours a day.

I used to talk much about the concept of work-life balance. I used to think there was always a clear demarcation line between the two, meaning our work-life pie should be split 50/50 — and as soon as I finished my work, the rest of my time was devoted to life. But that was a story from three years ago; now my perspectives are much different. Work-life balance is no longer an important issue, and we don’t need to view them as separate. The important thing here is to find a job that blends with life. That is, at all times, work and life must balance themselves, and we always feel a sense of fulfillment.

Work-life balance is no longer an important issue. The most important thing is to find a job that blends with life.

Can you share about the infrastructure upgrade strategies to turn Lozi, from a food review platform to an e-commerce and delivery app like today?

It’s a little “big hammer” to talk about infrastructure strategies. At the time when Lozi made a transformation into Loship, the things we knew about delivery were minimal, and we were forced to “learn on the go”. Previously, Lozi had already developed a system for users and merchants, and what we needed was to build a system catered to drivers. In just a month, we managed to create a complete system of distribution and started to operate the story of having an order, then a driver getting a notification and accepting the order.

It can be said that Loship was inherited and developed based on the existing foundation of Lozi, so there weren’t too many changes in infrastructure. The most important thing when it comes to designing an infrastructure system is that the first foundation steps must be standardized. And fortunately, these foundation steps of Lozi were very stable. Its infrastructure core was massive, and the only problem was how to exploit that infrastructure appropriately and in accordance with Loship’s services.

Generally speaking, the infrastructure changes were still the story of “learning on the go”, which I didn’t consider as a big strategy or anything. One of Lozi’s core values is “Speed matters” — it’s in our blood that requires us to move as fast as possible. Once we have released the initial version of the system, then comes the stage of system development and optimization. Move quickly, break things, make mistakes, learn from the mistakes, and keep improving — this is how “Learning on the go” is.

With the rapid business growth, the technology platform will surely bear a considerable pressure of transformation. So, what technology strategy do you have in mind to keep up with the business?

The role of technology is to support the corporate strategy and not to delay the business development plan. To develop technologies that will align with business objectives, we have developed a long-term plan and architecture roadmap in advance. For example, in early 2020, we have outlined and specified an infrastructure development plan for the next half-year, defining what needs to happen in the upcoming time so that the infrastructure would be developed to the desired stage.

And there’s one thing I always emphasize: Right at all times, the infrastructure must bear the load capacity of 10 times higher than the current system load. For example, right at the moment when 100 users access, the system capacity must be able to handle a 10X amount of 1000 users. As long as we can ensure that, most of the business problems will be solved.

We talk about scalability. Increasing traffic and user demand pose another problem of scalability. So what has Loship prepared to meet the scaling requirements?

There’re two methods to ensure the scalability of the system: scaling out or scaling up. Simply put, scaling out means adding more components in parallel to increase the existing infrastructure capacity linearly. Scaling up, on the other hand, is to optimize individual components or each line of code, making them bigger or faster so that they can handle more load.

We have in place a day-to-day plan for scalability, both scaling up and scaling out. For example, we specify how many servers can be expanded this month, next month and the months to come. All will be quantified according to the current system load limit and future system load capacity. And as I mentioned, at all times, the system must guarantee the load which is ten times higher than the current.

How about availability — the system’s ability to operate at any given time, responding 24/7 to all transactions without any downtime. Could you please share more about how Loship has been working to ensure its availability?

We have monitoring & alerting systems that help us observe and understand how the system is undergoing, what is the threshold at which the system will fail. Right at all times, I’m able to know the exact state of our system, server, indicators of Memory, CPU, RAM, etc. These are the basic metrics allowing us to actively monitor and detect any problems able to arise before they affect the users.

For example, it’s estimated that when the number of concurrent users reaches 10,000,000, the system will encounter specific problems. Then, at the time the system is loading 40% of the threshold, corresponding to 4,000,000 users, the monitoring & alerting systems will alert us about the scenario in advance so that we can have appropriate response plans.

At present, it’s hardly possible for our system to be corrupted and experience downtime. However, in the early stages, we have experienced quite a lot of problems related to server downtime and unexpected outages. Just as I said, it was like the story of learning on the go. As a startup, we had to do everything on our own; there was no one there to guide us on what to do to avoid such downtime and IT system outages. Even though we know the problem in advance as well as how to deal with it, but only when we literally face the problem, then react and fix it quickly enough, we will continuously improve and evolve.

In essence, the number of times you encounter a problem is not as significant as the speed at which you recognize the problem and solve it.

At Lozi, there is no limit in terms of technology. As the “brain” behind all Lozi technological breakthroughs, do you have any difficulty when applying a new technology?

From the beginning, I always have high confidence in the fact that there is no limit in terms of technology at Lozi. This is also one of our most significant advantages. The tech team’s exposure and access to technology are quite high, and once a problem arises, they can analyze and solve it themselves. The important thing here is how we develop a mindset of new technology access; we may passively run into a problem, but we have to actively find a way to solve it.

I always encourage all of my team members to keep updated with the technology news every day to get a grasp of how the tech world out there is moving. This is how we can acknowledge and develop a growth mindset.

I’ll give an example of how we apply new technologies. That is a back-end system story that took place four years ago. Back then, there were quite a few programming languages to develop back-end systems such as Java, Php, Node Js, etc., and Lozi decided to go with Golang. Golang was launched in 2009 and has since grown strongly in the global market. But at the time of 2015, in Vietnam, this language was still in its nascent stages, which very few local companies dared to apply. It could be said that Lozi was one of the pioneers to work on it. Only when Golang skyrocketed in popularity and has further gained momentum, did a range of Vietnamese companies start to do it “the Go way”. In the meantime, Lozi had already established its base in Go four years earlier.

Why do we decide to go with Golang? First, it’s the influence of language, Golang has relatively grown up, backed by Google, and has been adopted by major tech companies across the globe — along with a rapidly growing and large community to support the Go developers. Second, it’s the benchmark for maintenance and speed. The third reason is something dispensable when it comes to choosing a technology — that is the challenge of being a pioneer. This is what helps the developers evolve themselves and grow up to the next level — also how I build people in tech.

Recently, there have been some comments about the uneven quality between iOS and Android operating systems. Can you share more about this concern?

The story of the uneven quality between the two operating systems isn’t something new, and this issue can happen in any environment, not particularly in ours. Basically, the development cultures of iOS and Android are very different. In iOS, Apple is solely responsible for updating its own hardware using its own software. It doesn’t work the same way for Android. Android is mostly known for its fragmentation, which occurs simply because Android is an open-source operating system — that means, manufacturers are allowed to use Android as they please, customizing it and offering updates as they see fit.

Ensuring product quality on iOS and Android to be in sync is a challenge from the ground up. Yet, there’s always a solution to any problem. It depends on whether our product is up to the mark; our technical level is of the standard to meet the product requirements. We are entirely able to resolve such problems; all we need is time.

AI, Machine Learning, Data Mining, or Blockchain are some of the trending technologies of the future. What are your personal views on the potential of these technologies? What is the future of Lozi?

It will depend on which technology we’re talking about. For example, AI, Machine Learning, or Data Mining, those are technology trends that we will apply and must excel shortly, and we have already built primitive systems around them. As for Blockchain, at the moment, I think it’s a bit too soon to think of any blockchain applications. People often think of Blockchain as an emerging and flashy technology with enormous potential. However, the use of this technology depends on each specific environment. In e-commerce, there are quite a few points that can be exploited by Blockchain; even so, from a further perspective, I’m still not convinced by the tangible, strategic values that Blockchain could bring to our business.

As I said, we now have primitive systems of AI technology, Machine Learning, and Data Mining. The next story is to focus on modifying and optimizing those systems. We have a long way to go and will always be on the learning and optimal fronts.

Let’s talk a bit about your work perspectives. What are the most valued traits in colleagues you’re looking for?

The first is ownership: you must have extremely high ownership in every daily job you do. Second is value creation: you have to create value to stay in the team. And finally, it’s the responsibility for the job. I don’t take control over time; you’re free to decide how your role and tasks are carried out in your work schedule. There’s no one to remind you to do this or that, but you will have to be responsible for the team, with your work assigned.

What one piece of advice would you give to a newbie who wants to work at a tech startup?

Just don’t think of technology as something flashy. Technology must be used to create value and solve real-life problems of the outside world. If the startup keeps chasing those flashy things without solving the user’s issues, that startup will inevitably fail.

My advice is to stay on the ground, reduce the glamor and bring technology to the most realistic position possible.

We’ve reached the end of the conversation, now are a few quick questions:

• Three words that best describe yourself? Straight; blunt; clever.
• What are the three things you like most about your current job? Challenging; creating value for the community; bringing value to ourselves.
• Three work values ​​you never compromise? Blaming (no ownership); useless (cannot create value); lazy.
• What’s your favorite app? I like apps that provide me with the most value. It could be Medium or Hacker News.
• Three words describing the direction of technology in Lozi? Technology with global standards; build products that meet worldwide certification standards; build a team of top 1 technology talent in Vietnam.
• Three words to talk about the current Loship? Full-featured; create value; need further improvement.
• Three words to talk about Loship in the future? Top-1 user experience, Vietnamese people use Loship, national app (a national system).

Many thanks for this exciting conversation!

If you want to be a part of Loship’s development journey, join us: https://lozi.vn/career/