Engineer.inspect with Ying Wang
Talking Guo Bao Rou with a self-taught developer.
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?
Hi, I’m Ying Wang or 王莹 in Chinese, which means bright and lustrous. My pronouns are she/her.
What do you do at Vimeo?
I’m a Senior Software Engineer. I have been with the Collaboration team for over two years, working on features such as team branding, collaborative tools among team members, and team permissions. Now I am joining the brand new Authentication and Authorization team to focus even more on “Who are you? Are you allowed to perform this action?” type of work.
Which languages and frameworks do you use at work?
TypeScript and React on the front end and PHP on the back end.
Tell us about something you worked on recently that you crushed. Or that you were crushed by.
I’m working on team permissions on videos and other resources right now. We want Vimeo users to have straightforward and intuitive workflows, which means we have to do all the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Simplifying the permissions process is the hardest part of this project.
With teams, you can invite other people to maintain your Vimeo account and manage your videos and other assets. So when the owner of the team grants someone access to a folder, for example, how does that interact with existing permissions? How do you look up and update permissions efficiently? How do you know if a team member can be granted certain permissions or not? It is still a work in progress, but I’m really looking forward to how it will benefit not only our users but also other Vimeo services that need to know what kind of permissions a team member has.
Favorite thing about your job.
I enjoy discovering things that people don’t see, whether it’s a logic flaw in someone’s PR, an edge case that has previously been neglected, or a hidden pain point for our users.
What’s something you read recently that challenged you?
A book called Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. This book was challenging for me to read given my background as a self-taught engineer. I have never systematically learned about computer science, and my backend work has been mostly API-related, which is a relatively small portion of Vimeo’s back end. What I appreciate the most about Kleppmann’s book is that it helped me digest some unfamiliar topics that I have struggled with in the past, like data transactions, data replication, why database lag happens, and so on. But what I found so challenging about it is that he would discuss these things in terms of very specific low-level technologies like B-tree, SSTables, and LSM trees, which I had never heard of before. I try not to let the mountains of jargon discourage me! I’d rather just keep pushing forward. I’m still working my way through the book, but I’m hoping to finish by the end of the year.
It’s your last meal on Earth. Tell me about it.
It has to be this dish from northeastern China called Guo Bao Rou. Large, thinly sliced pieces of pork lightly coated with potato starch batter, deep fried twice until crispy, then stir fried with strings of carrots and ginger in a sweet vinegary sauce. I’ll enjoy it with medium-grain rice grown in northeastern China. Now you know where I’m from!
What has inspired you recently?
Hacktoberfest, which is a month-long global celebration of open-source software with a strong focus on encouraging contributions to open-source projects. While I was looking through participating repositories, I was amazed how some of them have streamlined automated flows that allow for even a newcomer to raise a PR and pass checks within a matter of minutes. Some also support Gitpod, which means you don’t even have to pull down the repo manually to your local machine and try to set up the environment. Everything can be done on the cloud. Participating inspired me to widen my horizons. Gitpod just seems like such a magical thing. Can’t wait to see how much easier it makes my life.
What are you most looking forward to this holiday season?
I saw some beginner’s tutorials on how to draw on an iPad, and I’m looking forward to trying them out. Drawing and painting have been interests of mine since childhood, but I can’t call them my hobbies since I don’t do them enough. Hopefully I’ll have a couple of drawings to show off when we come back from the holidays.
Leave us with your favorite Vimeo video.
Shamelessly leaving this video of my cat Tinker bell, which I made with Vimeo Create for the Vimeo Virtual Talent Show.
Care to join us? Check out our jobs page. And stay tuned for more Engineer.inspect posts.
