Faces of Uncountable

Meet Full Stack Engineer Vivian Li

Vivian talks about the freedom and control engineers have over the Uncountable platform

We’re happy to share a series of interviews with members of the Uncountable team. The purpose of these is to shed light on the people behind our platform, including their professional backgrounds, what led them to join our team, and what they work on behind the scenes.

Today’s interview is with Vivian Li, Full Stack Engineer at Uncountable.

Employee profile: Vivian Li — Full Stack Engineer

UNC: What projects are you leading at Uncountable?

Vivian: So, right now and through the past year, I’ve essentially taken over a lot of what’s going on with our Enter Data pages (for Enter Recipes and Enter Measurements). Recently, [I] just redid an entire design audit of those pages, and am working on just improving those features and fulfilling a lot of customer requests. I’m also leading some of the management and UX [design] in both the Reports and Inventory. And then I work a lot on other newer projects such as our Workflow Editing feature, as well as well plating.

UNC: Are these projects what you expected to work on when you joined Uncountable?

Vivian: I have never worked for a startup before, so I think that was kind of a shock coming in. There were just so many different things I could do, and so many parts of the code that I could touch. Whereas in previous jobs that I had, it was like: “here’s your one project, and you’re going to work on this every day for 10 weeks.”

I don’t think I was surprised that I would be picking up a lot of things, but I had never really experienced that, so there was definitely a learning curve. But, it’s been really great to dabble in a lot of different topics and learn a lot of things that I had previously never really done before.

UNC: What are some of the things you’ve learned over the past year?

Vivian: Definitely better code quality! I think in school, they teach you maybe the fundamentals of coding and, here are some principles. But you never really learn to apply it to production code. So, things like worrying about your code performance is something you don’t have to worry about in classes — because in class, it’s like “fulfill these test cases.” And then I think, especially at Uncountable, you have the whole spectrum of designing our feature, then afterwards building our feature, going through all these iteration processes, going to customers, and iterating on our feature again. I’ve never really had to do the full process like that, especially working with actual clients, instead of made-up clients for classes.

UNC: What made you accept the job at Uncountable?

Vivian: The work that we’re doing at Uncountable was very different. And no one’s really in this space. As you said, this isn’t a challenge that most people think of when they think of technology challenges. I just thought that it was a cool combination of what I’d enjoyed doing before with front-end data visualizations, and also solving this problem that I previously had when I was working in the lab.

UNC: Has there been anything surprising or unexpected about this job that you didn’t know coming in?

Vivian: I think I’ve just been really surprised at the growth. I think that one of the things I was worried about when joining the company was that the team was really small; I was worried that I wouldn’t get as much guidance as I would in other companies. But I think having joined this team, I realized that everyone was just very, very capable. Even if there aren’t as many people to reach out to, I found that everyone I have been able to reach has been super friendly, receptive, and just super smart. So, I’ve been able to learn so much from everyone.

UNC: Do you have any advice for someone considering joining Uncountable?

Vivian: Yeah! I think that one thing that’s important is to stay focused on what you want to get out of the experience. Because as much as you’re working for our customers and providing value for them, this is also providing a lot of value to you as an engineer, or whatever kind of role you stepped into in the company. Because our team is so flexible on what you’re doing, and because there are always new projects to come, you get a lot of freedom in saying, I want to do something that’s more math heavy, or I want to do something that’s more visuals heavy. So, if you’re able to ask yourself, “what makes me fulfilled in my role?” then you’re also able to have more fulfillment and enjoyment from your work because you can just take more control.

And I think that’s something I also just really appreciate about being here: that [at my previous jobs,] it’s like you get assigned a project and you’re just required to do it. But now, you can kind of pick your projects and you get a say in how they’re designed and how they’re executed. And your input really matters. So, just being able to have a voice and a company with what you believe in and how you want the company to be.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.