Problems, Scale and Video Games: Welcome to Honey Engineering
by Sam Aronoff
As a kid, I loved playing video games with my friends. We’d race home from school on our bikes and rush through homework to maximize our time playing Final Fantasy and Zelda. What had me glued to the screen was the challenge of solving hard problems in those games.
At the same time, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were dominating the software landscape, creating new technologies and solving problems people didn’t even know existed. And, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit it, but childhood Sam wanted to be Bill Gates. I wanted to build the technology and products that would revolutionize and disrupt industries. This passion led me to pursue a degree, and eventually a career, in engineering. After I graduated, I sought out companies that would challenge me and give me the opportunity to solve even bigger problems. This led me to a career in start-ups, and I am currently the VP of engineering at Honey (a browser extension that helps people save money while shopping online).
After working at multiple start-ups, I realized that not all start-ups are created equal. They may share similar traits — doing more work with insufficient staff, many late nights, and lousy take-out — but unlike bigger companies that have specialized roles and responsibilities, you wear many hats in start-ups, including coffee maker, La Croix restocker, and furniture mover!
When I started at Honey, I was one of twelve software developers building our extension and its supporting services. What I appreciated most with twelve, then twenty, and now over eighty engineers (and growing), is that we have a lot to build, and there are opportunities for new and existing employees to work on greenfield projects. We have a lofty mission (to make the world more fair by helping consumers save time and money while shopping online) and founders with an unending depth of vision. In my current role, I have endless opportunities to solve big problems and eventually lead a team of over forty engineers. Honey’s culture of innovation, diversity, and accountability led me to stay and thrive.
As a software developer, I’ve found people want ownership, independence, the ability to work with new technologies, and the ability to innovate. I know that’s what I was looking for when I landed at Honey. I, and all the leaders at Honey, work to ensure that every employee on the Engineering Team has these opportunities.
Honey will be building our teams and product for years to come, and with that comes opportunities to learn new technology, mentor, lead teams, architect big systems at scale, and own large portions of even larger platforms. Doing so allows people to learn and grow and makes work more enjoyable while also allowing us to scale our platform to millions of more users.
Every engineer at Honey works on code affecting over 10 million people; when we can’t make existing software work, we build our own. This gives staff the permission and opportunity to take ownership of building cool stuff (another core value), marshaling any and all required resources at our disposal.
Honey has provided me amazing opportunities for professional and personal fulfillment. We spend the majority of our adult lives at work, and I only want to work at a place where I get to make a huge impact on people’s lives while learning and laughing with some awesome coworkers. Honey is my happy place (when I’m not at an LA Kings game).
This is why it seemed like a good idea to pen some articles for Honey. As much as I would rather be developing software, the opportunity I’ve had to build and manage a team that works on cutting-edge technology and build products that reach millions of people is unprecedented. We will provide a deeper look at how we use and build technology to power products that help over 10 million people save time and money. We will share insights that we hope will not only provide a window into how we approach challenges at Honey but also prove useful to others as they tackle similar issues at their own companies. Our next post will be on our move from CloudSQL, Google’s managed MySQL, to Spanner, an infinitely scalable, ACID-compliant relational database service. Stay tuned!
