Engineer.inspect with Alice Xia
Alice in Frontend Land (and abroad).
Welcome to Engineer.inspect, an interview series introducing engineers across Vimeo. Get a glimpse into who we are and what we’re about.
Intro, please. What’s your name?
Hello! I’m Alice Xia and my pronouns are she/her.
What do you do at Vimeo?
I’m a Senior Engineer on the Frontend Platform team, specifically focusing on user experience. Our team’s goal is to make things more efficient for other developers by understanding friction points and advocating for best practices. We build tools and set up frameworks to streamline code development for other engineers.
Which languages and frameworks do you use at work?
I mostly work in React, TypeScript, Next.js, and Storybook.
What kind of problems does the Frontend Platform team try to solve?
So many! This year, the Frontend Platform team has a bunch of tooling we want to investigate and build out, including pnpm for speeding up runtimes, and more cloud functions to run jobs on a schedule. We’re also always on the lookout for improving documentation and code quality. On the user experience side, we’re working on speeding up development and improving design consistency through a bigger focus on prototyping in Storybook and increasing component coverage.
Tell us about something you worked on recently that you crushed. Or that you were crushed by.
Recently, our team completed the migration of the frontend apps to Next.js. This required plenty of restructuring and moving pieces. In the process, I had to dig through a lot of code. We migrated one app or project at a time, and since this usually involved moving whole folders of code to another place plus more edits to make it all work again, it resulted in pretty big pull requests. For every one of these migrations, I would get some anxiety about pressing that Merge pull request button, despite knowing that it already passed QA and build checks! Luckily, Vimeo has a great Developer Experience team ready to help if something goes wrong with deployment, and there’s plenty of build tooling in place to make sure errors aren’t pushed to production.
Favorite thing about your job.
I enjoy remote work and Vimeo’s flexibility. I’ve been able to travel and work from cities across the United States and Europe — something that I had never imagined doing before. At the end of the day, though, New York will always have a fond place in my heart. It’s loud, and there are some crazy critters, but no place can beat its diversity — in food, people, culture, and more.
What’s your favorite destination thus far?
That’s a tough one. I’ve been lucky to travel to many amazing places, my top three would be Kenya, Norway, and Iceland. If I had to pick one, it would probably be Iceland. I went this past summer with my partner, and the Fagradalsfjall volcano was erupting close to Reykjavík! Literally the first day we arrived, we decided at 9 P.M. that we wanted to go check out this volcano, since we were too jet-lagged to sleep anyway, and the midnight sun would mean we wouldn’t be hiking in pitch black darkness. It was a two-hour trek through several different weather patterns until we saw our first glow of orange, but once we saw the glow, it was a thousand percent worth it! I didn’t know you can literally hear the lava bursting out and landing, and we were able to get pretty close to flowing lava that crackled as it turned black, a surprisingly fast process. We went back to this volcano four times in two weeks. Besides the volcano, I also loved the culture of hot springs in Iceland and the beauty of the landscapes. I thoroughly enjoyed alternating between hiking and soaking my muscles in all the natural hot springs.
Any places on your bucket list for 2022?
I haven’t been to South America or Australia yet so anywhere on those continents are at the top of my list! One specific place I’ve been wanting to go is New Zealand to hike the Milford Track. It’s supposed to be gorgeous, passing through fjords, mountains, and rainforests. The trail follows a river, so you can’t really get lost — just look or listen for the river! As someone who accidentally goes off-trail a lot when hiking, this sounds pretty enticing.
When you’re not traveling, what does your work-from-home setup look like?
My setup has evolved since the beginning of work from home! Originally, I was just working from the couch most days. Then I moved to the dining table and got a monitor. I had pulled up an armchair, because I like cushiony seats. After realizing that my back and shoulders were constantly tense from my setup, I went shopping. Now I have a standing desk, and I also splurged on a proper desk chair that has adjustable height, can spin, and has wheels. My latest addition is a desk lamp that clamps to the side of the table.
In another life, what would you do for work?
It would definitely be something about creating with my hands. I love all sorts of crafts, from cross stitch to weaving to painting and, my latest venture, woodworking. I could see myself being an artisan woodworker. Peacefully shaping wood with noise protection earmuffs and safety glasses surrounded by tones of brown and tan. I love how the whole process feels meditative as well. My latest wood creation was a plant stand!
It’s your last meal on earth. Tell me about it.
It would be a conglomerate of dozens of small dishes, ranging from soup dumplings, saucy fried noodles, pork and chive dumplings, uni, extra-thin-crust pepperoni pizza, a Levain peanut butter chocolate cookie, and taro bubble tea. I think that’s what I love about New York. You can get sushi for lunch, Georgian food for dinner, bubble tea for dessert, then soup dumplings for brunch the next morning — and all top of the line in taste. Where else can you do that?
What’s something you read recently that challenged you?
I recently read the book Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger, and it has been really helpful for me to understand design principles and guidelines better. As a programmer who loves pretty designs, I usually have a sense of what looks good, but I have a hard time describing why. The book helped put reasons behind the madness and introduced me to user experience principles in a developer-friendly manner. For example, why do some typefaces look better as headlines versus some as smaller fonts? It turns out that headline fonts usually have tighter letter spacing and shorter lowercase letters. Another cool concept I learned was how to use two separate box shadows, one to simulate the shadow cast by direct lighting, and one cast by ambient lighting, for the best-looking floating object on a 2D screen.
What has inspired you recently?
I got into Peloton this year and while I feel like some of their content is a bit cheesy, it has grown on me! One instructor talked about how you need to identify as an athlete during a ride once, and that really resonated with me. I would have periods in my life where I would consistently work out but then revert back to being sedentary. Even when I was working out five times a week, I never identified as an athlete. I grew up uncoordinated and last-picked on teams for gym class, so of course I wasn’t an athlete. However, I realized that it was a mental block, and if you feel like something is a part of your identity and own it, it’s much more likely to stick and become something you truly enjoy, which means it will become a part of who you are in the future as well.
Leave us with your favorite Vimeo video.
Please enjoy Compositing Reel 2021 on Vimeo by my friend Andrew. He’s a motion graphics animator and video producer, and he was pumped to learn that I was joining Vimeo. It’s always exciting to see his work.
Care to join us? Check out our jobs page. And stay tuned for more Engineer.inspect posts. For more of Alice’s photos, see alicexia.com/photography.
