Open Book: Billy Roh
Hear from Billy about building a more inclusive industry and what coding and design have in common.
Open Book is a series of interviews where you get to meet our creative design team at Opendoor.
What do you do at Opendoor?
I’m a product designer on the operational tools team. When I first started, I was one of two designers, so I worked on everything from postcards to the homepage, the closing dashboard, and tooling for the customer support team. As the company got bigger, I narrowed my focus to operational tools. Most recently, I was the design lead for Mosaic, our design system for operational tools.
How did you choose to focus on internal tools?
I chose it because I can iterate more quickly and be closer to my customers. Since my customers are also my coworkers, I can go over to their desk, talk to them directly, and even sketch out ideas with them. What really makes it for me is the personal feedback I get. When a coworker tells me that I’ve saved them hours per week so they can spend more time with their family, it gives me a kind of emotional fulfillment that metrics could never provide.
I heard you run a monthly meetup called WaffleJS. How did you decide to start it?
WaffleJS is a monthly coding meetup with four 10-minute talks, along with a musical performance, that has around 100 attendees per month. Visnu and I started it in 2015 and we now have a co-organizing team of 8.
We started the event because we wanted a meetup centred around community, not recruiting. With most meetups in the Bay, you go to an office, listen to the company’s employee talk, then leave without meeting anyone there. With WaffleJS, we wanted to make people actually interact and have fun. To do this, we host it at a food truck venue so it isn’t recruiting-focused and we have great MCs and performers to make it light and fun.
Our second goal was around diversity and inclusion. We strongly believe that technology companies can and should reflect our customers. To address this, we make sure our speaker lineup is at least 50% women or non-binary, provide fully-subsidized tickets for students, and donate our proceeds to Black Girls Code. We’re not perfect by any means, but WaffleJS is our vision of what we think our industry can be.
I love that you’re into community-building. I know you’ve given creative coding talks at conferences, too. Can you tell me more about that?
I gave a talk in 2017 called Albers as a Millennial, where I created generative versions of Josef and Anni Albers’s works. I gave this talk because when your creative output is tied to a specific utility, it limits the range of solutions you come up with. But with art, it unlocks a part of your brain that’s far more expressive and exploratory. I also gave a talk on a similar topic in 2018 called Learning through Art, where I showed how to recreate an installation art piece by Yayoi Kusama in VR.
I really enjoy creative coding because I don’t see design and code as wholly separate disciplines. They’re creative tools that inform one another. With both in hand, you can think through entirely different categories of problems and solutions that you couldn’t approach with just one. I hope that as barriers to entry for both designing and coding get lower, the distinction between them become more and more meaningless.
How do you want to grow in 2019?
My life so far has seemed fairly linear — get good grades in high school, go to college, get a job, and get promoted. I’ve realized though that I’ve been busy executing on the plan laid out for me without working to understand my internal self. I haven’t truly asked myself what I want from life and what would make me deeply fulfilled. WaffleJS and my creative coding projects have helped me understand myself better, but I want to go further.
This year, I want to discover what is left when I tear away all external distractions and expectations. To do this, I’m meditating daily and going to therapy. They’re almost like taking your mind apart to see how it works inside. (I highly recommend Two Chairs, by the way.) I’m also writing more. I find writing to be a great way to capture the loose threads in your head and weave them into a coherent whole. It’s as much a tool for creativity as it is a tool to better understand yourself.
P.S. If you liked what you read and are interested in learning more, check out our jobs page! We’re always hiring.
