Riko Nagatama: From Going Fast to Going Far
There are a few people who, when given the freedom and immense flexibility, turn out to get even hungrier for more challenges. That’s pretty much the true depiction of Riko Nagatama — a Software Engineer Lead for the Accommodation Pricing team.
Riko was born and raised in Lampung. Throughout high school, he learned that mathematics and logical thinking were his strong points and still are. His programming teacher in high school once wanted all students to write code for a heart symbol using Turbo Basic. It wasn’t a hard quest to do for Riko since he could effortlessly finish it in an hour. “It was a fun time,” he said. Riko later took the chance in pursuing a computer science degree in Jakarta after a few convincing suggestions from his teachers and peers.
After graduating from college in 2010, he arrived at a crossroads of embarking on his career; either work for well-established companies or work as a freelancer. Back then, the world around Riko was advocating “freedom” as the right way to do for a living. Being a freelancer was a rising trend among his friends. Some of them started teaming up and Riko was invited to build a company website for reputable businesses. After weighing on the offer, Riko accepted it and started his freelancing profession.
Up until his third year as a freelance web developer, he was still very much enthralled with what he was doing. But afterward, he began to realize how much he was hungry for more challenges. The thrill that he used to experience from his freelancing routine was fleeting away. Riko had become so skillful with using PHP and JavaScript in building websites that he started to wonder,
“Am I capable of many more tech stacks, knowing that the world of programming is so expansive, or am I going to keep on building typical websites over and over again?”
With that question lingering in his mind, he began to apply for jobs and got into Traveloka in mid-2015. Since then, Riko, who was used to working solo, has from that point onwards, been working with several teams under the Accommodation business unit, namely Customer System, Accommodation Affiliate, and currently works as the lead in the Accommodation Pricing team.
Hard Times and Challenges
In one of the conversations that I had with Riko, I asked what kind of difficulties he had encountered at work. “Well, it depends. When I was in the Affiliate team, the challenge was how to build an affiliate system that could connect to multiple affiliates with different needs and behaviors efficiently. While in the Pricing team, the challenge is more on setting the best price for all hotels, check-in dates, and several other variables without sacrificing scalability.”
He also mentioned that working as a Traveloka engineer has been way more challenging, but rewarding, compared to being a freelancer in the past. Since Traveloka serves millions of users every day, he has to constantly think about implementing an optimized system while handling the associated code complexity. “For a website that serves 10 requests per minute, a block of code that takes 1 second to complete doesn’t really mean anything. But for Traveloka that serves thousands of requests per minute, a block of code that takes 1 second to complete may not be acceptable. It can eat up a lot of resources like processing power and memory usage while slowing down the API latency and costing a lot. But that’s the kind of challenge that I think every software engineer really loves to solve.”
When Riko started his initial leading role in 2016, he read a leadership book titled The 360 Degree Leader, written by John C. Maxwell. “From that book, I learned how important it is for me, as a leader, to be able to wear different ‘hats’ when talking to others. The hats, in this context, are the various ways of communication to determine what is the best approach to talk to any kind of person in any situation. The hat I have to wear when talking to my manager and when I talk to my teammates are different. When talking to my teammates, I focus more on how to nurture them, how to help them to think about how to solve their work problems. But when talking to my manager, I have to use a different hat because one of the topics we discuss is surely not about how to nurture him. Those are the two key points that I learned from that book.”
If I can only take one thing away from many conversations I had with Riko throughout his time in Traveloka so far, it would be that we have to start anywhere to get somewhere; in other words, to get better. He might have gone fast as a solo freelancer, but with Riko’s innate passion, dedication, and perseverance for his work and the help of his team, he would essentially go far in tech than he could have if he were to remain a single player.
Are you also thinking of going farther the way Riko does? check out Traveloka’s career page to discover your next journey.
