Q: What is your name and how long have you been at ServiceRocket?
A: My name is Faris Amali Alis. I work out of the Kuala Lumpur office and I have been a Rocketeer for roughly a year and a month.
Q: What is your current role in ServiceRocket?
A: Officially, my title is Agile Developer and I am currently attached to the Reliability team where the current focus is to make the necessary changes throughout the application ecosystem for the big migration to Kubernetes.
Q: Why did you decide to join ServiceRocket? What did you do before?
A: I was previously working for a startup selling t-shirts but a friend who got a job here told me about how awesome the Engineering team at ServiceRocket is. ServiceRocket had the reputation for its solid engineering practices despite being a relatively small development shop. Some of the interesting practices that got me hooked was 1) that they are big on functional programming paradigms 2) they adopt bleeding edge technologies fast 3) and architectural decisions are autonomous to teams.
Q: What makes working at ServiceRocket unique or different from your previous experiences?
A: The uniqueness of any working experience, in my opinion, derives from the engineering challenges that a particular organization faces. ServiceRocket’s in-house products are currently scaling quite significantly, therefore poses very interesting engineering challenges both at application level as well as at operational level.
Q: What unique challenge or problem have you worked on at ServiceRocket?
A: I’m particularly proud of shipping our own property-mapping rule engine for our authorization layer because it enables faster customer onboarding process and allowing greater flexibility on how identity data are captured and stored within the application. This project commenced earlier this year and completed just over a month.
Q: Have you had any transformational or inspirational moment from someone at ServiceRocket?
A: Sure! I would attribute most of my transformational moments from the 1:1s with my tribe lead David Chui, who has been very supportive and empowering to my personal growth.
I’ve always believed that 5 years of experience can be obtained in just a year if mentored and guided well, and without doubt I’ve avoided pitfalls and learnt to become mature in my craft.
Q: Tell us about a moment your team mate helped you to overcome a challenge where time was of essence?
A: We had a service outage for ~7 minutes for one of our customers due to a misconfigured deployment pipeline. During our post-deployment testing, I’ve identified that one of our customers was having login issues. I immediately called upon my (only) teammate to discuss the issue at hand and devise a recovery plan. We managed to recover from the outage and rectified the misconfiguration. I would credit the success of handling the situation to the professionalism that this company has ingrained in its culture.
Q: Have you had transformational or inspirational moments at ServiceRocket?
A: To me, team dynamics are `status quo` that has to be earned. It requires time, effort and a whole lot of patience to making mutual concessions. Once achieved, not only does the working environment becomes more comfortable to work in, it will ultimately garner collective drive for success of the product.
Q: What are your hobbies? Or what can we find you doing outside of work?
A: I have a lifelong desire to compose and produce music one day but in the meantime, you can find me on the court managing and coaching a community basketball team after after work and on weekends.
Q: Is there something interesting about you that not a lot of people know?
A: I recently underwent eye surgery to both of my eyes to correct Keratoconus. A condition that resulted from childhood eye scratching habit. I’m mentioning this here as a PSA for those with eye scratching habit out there. Stop scratching your eyes, use eye drops instead!
