Three Years

7 February 2020 marks my 3rd year work anniversary at Shopee. In this post, I will highlight the changes since my first day at work: people, project, and process.

People

When I joined the team, I was the fourth one in the team! Now, ummm, I I’ve lost count! It is now around 30 people I guess. I don’t really know about the growth of headcount of the whole company, but they follow roughly this same exponential growth. Yeah, the headcount exploded (figuratively)!

P.S. Since I’ve joined, I’ve moved my desk six times! They are all due to headcount explosion: we move to other corner of office so other team could expand; or we move to other building/floor!

Project

Back when I joined the team, it was the Shopee’s “PC Mall” team, called that way because that team focuses only on the desktop browser version of Shopee. When I joined, that project is around one year old, yet the codebase is already very big. Yet it kept expanding. Few months in after my first day, another project was started to take over the mobile browser platform by rewriting page by page. This means that the team isn’t “PC” team anymore, that’s why we’re now called the “Web Front-End” team.

Process

Finally, the biggest change over this part 3 years, is about process.

In the good old days, we can deploy our codes to production whenever we like. The implication of this is that, product mangers who really cares about their projects, will request a specific date and time to deploy to production. On some days, there could be deploys in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening! All we do for the whole day is deploying!

Luckily, a product manager stepped up to start a release management process and now we have a proper release management team to handle releases. I’m actually glad that a release process was put in place. Although it slows things down, including when there is a critical bug on production, in most days, this release process means that end-user will see a more stable Shopee.

Besides that release management process, there are definitely many more processes that were introduced in this past three years. I think I also contributed to it: I helped set-up some of the continuous integration jobs in our shared repository (which developers need to pass those before being able to merge to the master branch).

Conclusion

So many things have changed since I join back in 2017. There are definitely many more things than just more people, more projects, and more processes, but they are endless to mention one by one. Since the only constant in life is change, many more will come! To many more changes!