Designer Spotlight: Sasha Klein
Meet Sasha, Senior Software Engineer

Why did you join Redshift?
Good vibes ;)
The office was bright and open, everyone I met was friendly and relaxed, and my interviewer (now boss) was warm, honest, direct, and reasonable. I got a strong impression that Redshift was a pleasant place to work, filled with smart, curious, intellectually diverse folks. That impression has lasted well into my second year.
How did you learn to be a developer?
Unexpectedly. I took an intro to CS course in college and absolutely hated it: I sent my teacher a long whiny email, skipped the final project, and left the course behind me with great relish.
Two years later, I was teaching and college counseling in China, and decided to parallel-track a couple futures that didn’t involve working on students’ college applications. A friend and I briefly tried to start a business in China, I began studying for the LSAT, and I dived into some online dev courses. When I moved to SF, coding quickly asserted itself as the most alluring of the three, and I launched into building a community meat-sales app (“Meatup”) as a way to learn how to code.
A cow, a pig, a coding bootcamp, and a quick internship later, I dropped the meat-sales concept and got my first engineering job with the same online bootcamp I’d first learned with. It’s been a whirlwind of JavaScript frameworks ever since.
Tell us about a project you’re especially proud of.
Meatup, my first legit web-development project, was at the time clearly over my head. It involved trying to predict, on the basis of breed, feed, and weight, how much of, say, a 1200lb grass-fed Black Angus would end up as ribeye steaks, so I could sell them before buying the cow. The system was built to become more accurate with each animal, as the data for previous grass-fed cows (or Hereford pigs) was fed into an improving predictive cut model.
I layered on top of that a marketplace and a lightweight tool for trying (unsuccessfully) to get butchers to digitally track the meat they cut and wrapped. Eventually, I gave up on trying to solve this problem on my own, deciding that it was largely insolube: One cow of a given breed, feed, and weight is about as likely to share body type with a similar animal as are two 150lb humans. But it was fascinating and complex, and I’m still pretty impressed that I managed to sell two whole animals through my app to a number of friends, family, and carnivorous randos. And I learned a ton.
How do engineers make design better?
Engineering has a huge role to play in the design process, and I honestly think any design agency that isn’t incorporating engineers will produce incomplete or problematic designs. We bring a couple extremely important things to the table:
- Limitations: Engineers help set the bounds of a design process. We have unique knowledge of the costs of design decisions which may be too complicated for a client to build out or accurately approximate. We’re also uniquely aware of technical boundaries that can’t be designed around, such as APIs that simply disallow expected behavior.
- Mindset: Engineers are trained to think high-level and long-term. A great designer does as well, but the incentive structure of studio design — which often involves designing for a particular near-term handoff or presentation — can naturally create blindspots where designs are inherently specific or don’t fully consider multiple or long-term use cases.
- Patterns: Coders hate unnecessary repetition and slight, unjustified variation. We orient towards repeatable and clear patterns — as do most “users”. The nagging voice of an engineer pressing for greater consistency and simplicity — and a clear set of rules to base behaviors on — aligns significantly with the clarity, predictability, and smoothness which define an effortless user experience.
What do you like to do outside of the studio to stay creatively inspired?
I’m currently nerding out on two big vehicular projects — a mobile sauna and a Burning Man “art car”. For the former, some friends and I built out a big barrel sauna, affixed it to a trailer, and have been driving it around to farm events and pop-ups in the city, “building community through sweat” and weirding out passersby. You can check us out at www.leftcoastsauna.com!

The art car is a gigantic version of the Nyan Cat internet meme, with over 7000 programmable LEDs, which will roam around the desert handing out pop tarts. The project has involved welding, LED programming, and a ton of other skills I know nothing about, so it’s been a blast to work on. The fundraising and schedule are tight, but whether or not we’ll get it out there this year, the cat will, eventually, ride — and we hope to bring it to other events, festivals, and more in the coming years. You can help bring this ludicrous project to life at www.nyancar.com!

I also love food, and spend an improper amount of time cooking for/with friends and trying to ferment new things. Planning on a multi-varietal, variable-method hard-cider brewing spectacular when apple season rolls around in the fall.
What’s the toughest thing about your job?
Constant iteration. Quality design work is rarely static, and much of my job involves both predicting which elements of a design are most likely to change and reacting to design changes I didn’t predict. The process is faster and less certain even than coding for a startup, because we settle for good-enough less often.

Karaoke song of choice?
Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” is probably my go-to. I like to start ambitious (MJ/Prince) and fall back to the Johnny Cash register as I inevitably lose my voice. In my former life in China, I enjoyed breaking up the stream of teary love songs my coworkers sang with an out-of-place round of Kanye hits.

