I learned to code way back in 1996. I was quite young at the time, but I was surrounded by computers. My dad was into computers, and I felt that I had enjoyment from following in his footsteps. He was an influential model for me. At the time, I wanted to develop a website for my all-time favorite TV show, Power Rangers. This was probably because my dad was learning about the Internet then, and he was also making websites also. I would bring up Microsoft FrontPage 97, which would then help me create HTML pages, which led me to creation of websites that I could then upload via FTP to Geocities. I don’t remember what Geocities page I had, but I do remember that I had a picture of a Megazord somewhere.
That passion grew as I was exposed to more television, which somehow I have integrated into my life. It has made a lot of wonderful memories. I used to remember a memory where back in Indonesia, my uncle and my cousins would gather around with me and my family to watch animated movies. I do have fond memories of those times, as it felt like it was a sense of enjoyment. With those passions, it eventually evolved into making more fan sites of TV shows of games, which eventually became fan sites of Japanese animation, or what we know as anime. Eventually, I had stopped creating fan websites because the Internet was evolving. Social media became the norm, which was how people consume media. People no longer had to make websites to show content. They could just show content on social media platforms like Facebook, or Twitter, which I became a part of.
In school, I pursued a degree in Computer Science and Engineering due to my passion for computers. There I would then find my core focus to be in user interface development, which could be described as a parallel to my hobby of consuming animation. User interfaces are what people use today to do things on a device in order to get an action done. I then learned that I could also apply my knowledge of web development as a way of making user interfaces (UIs), which became vital to the landscape of the Internet today.
Today, I ended up in a role where I am able to take what I learned in school and apply to what I enjoy consuming, which is anime. I work at Crunchyroll as a Staff Software Engineer, in which I helped develop and lead direction of many different new user interface applications for consuming anime in new and emerging living room devices.
It was a long journey though. I didn’t start off working at Crunchyroll when I first graduated from school. I had first worked as a Software Developer in Test in DIRECTV, who would love to make testing applications to help make testing set top boxes easier. I had learned the principles of testing, I had learned what it takes to apply my core focus in user interface development into practice, where I worked with other engineers whose goal was to help make accurate test results for developers. Afterwards, I decided I wanted to transition to solely focus on UI engineering, which led to my role at OpenX. There I would help other website owners (publishers), monetize the empty spaces they had with advertisements. I would create user interfaces to help publishers figure out the best way of monetizing, set up ad rules, and even help setup ad integration code for publishers directly. From my experiences, one thing stood in common as a rule that I follow: Learn what the user will do, then everything else will follow. That is how I believe how I got to my role today. I felt that I always had anticipated what a user could possibly do, which led me to ensure that I had delivered good user experiences.
However, I didn’t always deliver good user experiences. I had learned from my mistakes throughout my career. I felt that a lot of the mistakes come from learning how to communicate, and deeply understand how I arrived at that mistake. I would then learn from it, and I felt that itself was also rewarding, because it came with a heap of knowledge that I would end up inheriting. With that knowledge, I ended up also learning how to be more cautious, and I would then motivate myself to be able to monitor results quantitatively rather than qualitatively. This would end up being in a form of analytical dashboards that I would then monitor to be able to easily spot mistakes and retroactively recover from them.
A proudest moment I had was when I was able to help a fellow anime enjoyer through customer support to be able to consume content in their living room device. No matter what the user had tried, they kept getting an error when trying to play anything at all. I was in the midst of delivering a full rewrite of that living room device’s application, and all I could do for customer support was to ask the user to wait. On the day of the launch of the rewrite, the user was able to enjoy watching anime through their living room device. That gave me a sense of adrenaline, which empowered me to continue developing great user experiences.
If there is something to learn from my journey for those inspired to get into the role of Computer Science, is to do what makes you happy, as that will make your job rewarding. Computer Science isn’t easy though, and there will be mistakes and lessons learned. However, it’s the mistakes that can also come with a heap of knowledge, which then empower us to become better. This allows us to help deliver great experiences for the end user.