Edward Song

Edward is a software engineer at Retaken, which builds experience management software for clients such as Autodesk and Hilton. He manages a machine learning platform used for survey analysis and has been coding professionally for 4 years.

Work

How does your company make money?

Retaken works on a subscription model. The majority of our revenue comes from sales of subscriptions to our experience management platform.

What problems do you solve?

I design utility software to tune the parameters of machine learning models with ease.

How do you think about code correctness?

I try to be clear, not clever. If you think about it, we spend a lot more time reading code than writing it.

Day in the Life

What’s a typical day like?

Stand up, sit down, refine features with my product team. We deploy twice a week.

Tell us about your home office.

I have a standing desk, ergonomic mouse and use a wired headphones. Not a fan of mechanical keyboards quite frankly.

Any programming language you want to pick up?

Probably Elixir

Technology

Any open source project of interest?

I find Svelte pretty dope.

Any conference or meetup?

I don't like to travel, but I attend CES every year.

If you were to build an application today, what technologies would you use?

Ruby on Rails served via Nginx. No React.

Reading

Do you follow any tech blogs?

I read all the big ones, including Netflix and Uber.

What books have helped you become more effective at what you do?

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Career

Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?

I want to move to San Diego with my partner and start a family.

What career advice you wish someone had told you when you started?

"You don't have to agree with every point people make, but it might be worth understanding where they're coming from."

In what ways does your company support career development?

I get an annual stipend of $1500. A sabbatical after 3 years.