The Fix Is to Rewrite the Main Page
On a fine day in early March 2020, I was notified by an administrator of Indonesian Wikipedia that the site looks horrible on mobile web!
Oh my gosh, I remembered that it didn’t use to look like that!
…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!
2019 in Review
Well, this year, this blog has been quiet. There are more Instagram cross-post here than there are new text-based posts in this blog. There are only 4 non-photo posts. It’s not without effort though, I have 12 more posts in the drafts! The reason of not publishing them is just because I lost interest before I finished writing, and sometimes after I finished, I found that the central argument was quite weak and didn’t deserve publication.
Anyway, this post is about reviewing 2019, not to rant about why I published so little.
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On Elevator, Escalator, and Progress
In the new Shopee (Singapore) building, my desk is located on the 4th floor. I usually entered the building from the 1st floor (there is another entrance on the 3rd floor).
After I enter the building, it is still the public area, I have two choices of going to the staff-only area: through the gantry gates on the 1st floor, or through the 3rd floor. Going to the 3rd floor on the public area requires taking two flights of escalators.
If I enter the staff-only area from the 1st floor gantry gate, I will take the elevator (lift) to the 4th floor; but if I enter from the 3rd floor gantry gate, I will take the stairs to my floor (since the difference is only by a single floor).
On a normal day, I will always take the escalators to the 3rd floor, enter the staff-only area, and then take the stairs to my floor.
I have a theory on why I prefer this, and I think, it is the classic “loading screen experience” happening in real life.
Waiting for elevator to arrive is just like a progress bar that stopped progressing for unknown period of time (and users don’t know when it will continue to progress). On the other hand, riding escalators and taking stairs give the users a sense of physical progress and therefore a more pleasant experience.
While it may take longer to reach my floor, I don’t need to wait for something out of my control to happen, and that’s a better experience rather than waiting for uncontrollable elevator to arrive.
That’s why I prefer taking escalators and stairs rather than elevators. Unless I’m peer-pressured by my colleagues. 😅
Non-fiction Books
22 September 2019
Over 2019, I’ve been reading books, mostly fiction books, but a considerable amount of them are non-fictions. One of my goals that I set in “2018 in Review” is to read more non-fiction books than that in 2018. It’s pretty easy to achieve, since in 2018, I only read 1 non-fiction book.
…Raun, the history
Raun is a web application that lets you monitor the recent changes of Wikimedia projects, live. Mouthful, but that’s basically what it does.
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