What Bits make you a Byte?
The human race in its essence is really the ultimate form of Mr. Potato Head. The good people at Priceline are no different. We are a rich tapestry of unique individuals who are in turn made up of pieces of other people. Mosaics within a mosaic if you will. Like any good program we do inherit some things, but we are mostly a composition 😉 of other elements. Our mother’s eyes were given to us as was our father’s hairline *shakes fist*. We did however, get to choose our own linter …on side projects.
So what bits make us a byte? Have we borrowed a bit of jargon here, and some code style there? A dash of data structure usage and a sprinkle of command line wizardry? Do we know our coworkers’ favorite programming jokes? Have we jacked their text editor themes? Did we learn git bisect with a coworker and act like a level 65 Git Paladin with a 10x rebase buff? Do you even git-flow!?
At Priceline, we try to foster a collaborative environment and encourage everyone to work with everyone else. As developers, quite often we move around like the goo in lava lamps, breaking off of one glob of people and joining another only to break from that glob a little while later. Guess what happens? We contribute what we learned with the old group while simultaneously learning from the new group. If we are not learning from or with the people around us, something is wrong.
I decided to ask around a bit to gauge how people have grown and progressed during their time here. What have we gleaned? What have we contributed? Who has inspired us? Who keeps us on our toes? Who won’t get out of our heads? Name names! I sent a survey to the entire engineering team and asked for a diverse set of voices. A few kind souls across a few different teams who didn’t mind being spammed sent along their answers. Their seniority levels are purposefully left out. Here are the respondents:
- BS: Frontend Engineer
- VJ: (mostly) Backend Engineer
- SD: (mostly) Frontend Engineer
- AA: Anonymous App Team Engineer
- JS: DevOps Engineer
Are there some techniques, patterns, tools, etc. that you picked up from anyone at Priceline and use often (doesn’t have to be technical)?
SD: “One of my mentors provided sage advice about PR’s [pull requests]. Sometimes a quick face-to-face and a comment to summarize the discussion is a lot more productive (and generally appreciated by the submitter) than a long back and forth in comments.”
VJ: “Test Driven Development, Listening to tech podcasts”
AA: “Yes, how to communicate technical issues. People usually don’t have time and patience to follow through all the technical details to see an issue. It is important to abstract key details and present them. I struggled initially because I didn’t know what I was doing wrong, but a teammate helped me understand how technical issues need to be communicated, and how to [get to the point]. Also, it was very challenging for me to explain technical challenges or complications to the product team. My teammate helped me in communicating these complications in a non technical fashion to them. I eventually worked on these skills and became more comfortable now.”
JS: “Too many to list. After moving into the devops team, I learn from people who come from a more sysadmin background that I do every single day. It’s a different mind set than what I’m used to coming from a software development background.”
BS: “One of the most important things I am trying to emulate is something I see in Pedro Gutierrez, who seemingly has relationships with the entire company. Whenever something is needed he knows who to ask and what they do, and they know him. That is invaluable. Also, if I don’t close my laptop during meetings, I can feel Mike Gertrudes’ eyes on me, and he doesn’t even work here anymore.”
Is there anyone who either inspires you, keeps you on your toes, or pushes you to be better in some way, directly or indirectly? Who and Why?
SD: “John Masse — even though he’s moved on to the back-end, he really knows the front-end and will challenge you, in review, on design, etc — to make sure your output is the highest quality it can be.”
VJ: “Imran Chowdhry always made me challenge myself. John Masse always inspires with his knowledge and approach to problem solving, and also challenges to improve craftsmanship. Stephen Sullivan by his calm approach to solve hot issues and with the code reviews.”
AA: “One of the senior engineers on my team always inspires me to bring the best to table, poses difficult questions. We used to have weekly discussions that I scheduled on our calendars where we discussed to understand pros and cons of some latest component or framework or language that has been introduced. Also from time to time my reviews with my manager helped me understand expectations on me as an engineer. It helped me visualize where I stand today how I can progress myself.”
JS: “Sean Elble because he has the ability to understand all sides of a problem. Technical, business, speed to market and maintenance cost. If he sees us pigeon holing ourselves, he’s the first to speak up.”
BS: “So so many people. Former Priceliners like Mike Gertrudes, Chris Ng, Sam Lau, Josh Blaney and many more. Currently Craig Palermo , Steve Dalonzo, or Anuj Patel, because they have good ideas and are always up to something. Rivali Dhanekula for her vast knowledge of business logic and Maedah Safari who seems like she could do anything she puts her mind to while not bragging about it.”
What could the today version of you teach the first day at Priceline version of you?
SD: “Challenge things sooner, ask questions sooner. Just because something is done a certain way doesn’t mean it is good/right/optimal.”
VJ: “Software engineering is an art as well as science. Always try to do some thing that will make the code a little better than how it was previously.”
AA: “Ownership over features that I work on. I always relied on QA or Product to answer questions that are not related to implementation details regarding features that I used to work on. Ever since I got that sense of ownership of the product, it has been very smooth for me and I find myself more reliable than I used to be for my team.”
JS: “Everybody makes mistakes. It’s about how you learn and grow from them.”
BS: “Outside of actual technologies like Node, AngularJS, React, GraphQL and more in-depth JavaScript, I would teach myself how to build relationships with as many people as I can and not live in a bubble with my project.”
Are there any mistakes you have made or seen from others that you have learned from?
SD: “Just not questioning things earlier — no one is infallible, no one knows everything — asking questions can help to further your understanding, and I find explaining things to folks who ask questions to help reinforce my own knowledge.”
VJ: “Taking ownership of testing the feature. Also the definition of `DONE`, means the change should be deployed to production, not just QA complete.”
AA: When we don’t understand the architecture or vision of any feature we work on, we should stop wondering within ourselves and raise the question. Also, we should push ourselves to gain work-life balance. We cannot expect our manager to tell us to stop working [editor’s note: sometimes they do]. We should have defined TODOs for a day and address them in a constructive manner.”
JS: “Most of the bigger mistakes I have made have come from lack of discipline. Back when I was a product developer, I once released a “bug fix” to a submit button on a product contract page. The “bug fix” had a bug which allowed users to click it multiple times. In a rush to close out my ticket, I didn’t properly test the functionality before pushing it production. We spent days combing the database for everyone who it affected and working with customer service to get everyone refunded.”
BS: “Not doing null checks. Not adding a catch to Promises. Not handling errors in a friendly manner. Not logging enough. Allowing logging to effect performance. Not fully understanding tech/features we are trying to use. Not being thorough and defensive in code. All of these have bitten us in production. Not thinking about the people we code with and even ourselves in 6 months has cost valuable sprint time.”
Any cool stories about a fellow Priceliner, or is there anyone you want to shout out that you love working with?
JS: “My entire team [DevOps], and I’m not just saying it. We have assembled an insanely smart group of people with such a diverse set of skills.”
BS: “I have a healthy respect for people like Malek Hakim, Elizabeth Funk, John Masse, Alex Bachuk, and Justin Krup for running up meetups. I’d like to shout out to everyone who has ever participated in the Flights Team plank/wall sit sessions. I’ve also seen other teams doing things like that so shout out to them too. Also, Dinesh Persad, who one day worked a crazy overnight shift at the NOC in Connecticut and then volunteered all day at the Bowery Street Mission in NYC”
Lastly, What are some things you are proud to have contributed to Priceline?
SD: “Several of the performance initiatives in [the first half of the year] came from my mental backlog — RenderInView, MediaQueryMatch, Listings Load Experience, Idlize Impression Firing, Defer TMS, etc.”
VJ: “By adding a lot more test coverage to the platform code, we were able to improve the product experiences and reduce the product down time and the corresponding production support.”
JS: “I think the biggest and furthest reaching feature of our pipeline that I shaped would have to be our chatbot, scotty. It started out as a side project that me and Michael James worked on after hours just so we can learn and possibly use for ourselves. Then it spread line wild fire and has since become an integral part of our pipeline, kicking off builds and deploys for all of our product applications.”
BS: “I have made small contributions to our open source design system, and I’ve tried to give good solid guidance to some of the developers I’ve worked with. I try to be a good citizen”
Interested in learning more about life and careers at Priceline? Visit our career’s site. For anyone looking for some good travel deals, we do that too.
