Women in Engineering: Front-End Engineer Meets Food Delivery
by Nur Liyana Mohd Lazim, Software Engineer for airasia food
Girls vs boys? Nope! We’re embracing fair play here at #TeamTeleport! Meet Nur Liyana Mohd Lazim, fellow Software Engineer for the airasia food team. Read on to get to know more about her!
What does a typical day in your job involve? Any exciting projects that you’re currently working on that you’d like to tell us about?
On a daily basis, my job consists of transforming the design that our designer has created based on our Product Manager’s requirements. I ensure the design is coded exactly per the request, and this includes the smallest details such as the spaces between the elements. I believe that every design is crafted after extensive research for the ease of accessibility for our users.
Currently, I am working on airasia food. I’m really happy that I could help build the airasia food platform. It is definitely more challenging compared to what I’ve done previously, as the framework is a lot bigger, but I feel so happy when I see screenshots and pictures of the design that our team has coded in tabloids.
What inspired you to become a front-end engineer?
Back when I was in high school, there was a trend of decorating our personal online blogs to make them beautiful. Usually, we would go to the websites that provided free templates to copy-and-paste the codes onto the blog platform’s (e.g. Blogger) online HTML template editor. The code changes would reflect in the appearance and make our blogs beautiful. We would also add music and change the backgrounds using other codes provided on the internet. It was from there that I found my passion towards making something beautiful using codes, and I was driven to pursue Computer Science in my university.
Before becoming a front-end engineer, I did explore other things such as back-end engineering using Java, but eventually I would still return to front-end engineering. To sum it up, I like pretty things, and enjoy making something beautiful using codes!
Engineering is known as a particularly intense field. What would you say is the most challenging part of your job?
The most challenging part is ensuring that the application is bug-free. An e-commerce application is extremely crucial as it involves profits and losses. If our website is running slow, or if there are any errors, then there would be a situation where the company may experience a financial loss. Hence, when coding, it is important to ensure that the code is working perfectly.
What are the biggest misconceptions people have about your job?
As a front-end engineer, I’ve heard many say or assume that front-end engineering is an easy job. But in all honesty, front-end engineering is not easy… in fact, it can be quite tedious. It requires a lot of attention to detail to complete certain tasks.
Tell us some fun facts about yourself! A little bird told us that you like planting vegetables… tell us how you got started on that!
When the COVID-19 pandemic started last year and we had to stay home to work, I tried to find something new to explore. I started to play games and even built my own portfolio website! Since I still had time to spend at home, I decided to start learning about gardening. The reason I choose gardening is so that I can avoid looking at the computer screen all the time and take regular breaks ‘outside’. I don’t have any knowledge of gardening, so it was mostly just trial and error — some of my plants died halfway, but some of them I actually got to eat! Overall, I think gardening is one of the therapeutic ways for me to calm myself down when I get stressed.
Finally, what do you hope to see change, whether in the company as a whole, or in your own personal growth?
I’d love to see more female in-house engineers! I believe that there are a lot of competent female engineers out there who are skilled in different fields. Besides that, I would also like to explore more on the other aspects of creating something beautiful with codes, but in a different environment… like maybe developing mobile apps.
