I have been living in Japan for 10 years (5 years working) and helping people to solve problems has been my passion. My job title is backend engineer but coding has been like 20% of my daily routine. For most of the days, I am spending time talking to the sales/product manager to understand what our team needs, and helping teammates with system design and code reviews. I am not sure if you agree with me but I have always believed that there is a simpler way to solve problems. To give you one example, I will tell you a story about what happened today. (Yes, today !).
In my previous company, we build ad delivery platforms to serve various formats of ads for our advertisers. One of the formats we support is a multi ads format where you can serve multiple banner ads in a fixed size frame (imagine 8 banner ads in a 300 x 500 pixels frame). When we launched this format we didn't do any optimization for what kind of ads it will serve. It was good until recently a lot of duplicated ads happened (8 banner ads but 2 are the same ads due to the same advertiser but different agencies). Data showed that removing duplication might lead to a better click-through rate but the sales team had been refusing to do it because in some cases we might don't have 8 different banner ads to serve 8 placeholders which might lead to less income and bad user experience when there is an empty placeholder. A dummy ad could be inserted into the empty placeholder but when there are few empty placeholders we need different dummy ads and usually dummy ads don't generate income. Sales had been suggesting testing it out in production by removing duplication for selected targets. This seems like a good call but to make this experience successful target selection has to be careful, we also have to implement this logic into our system which adds complexity and last but not least if targets were not selected carefully this process had to be repeated. After discussion, I came up with the idea to sort the ads by uniqueness.
So to serve 8 placeholders (8 is just an example in real life this might be larger),
- if we have 8 different ads then 8 different ads could be served (good click-through rate)
- if we have 8 ads but 2 of them are the same ad then we would make the same ad to be placed into the first and last placeholder (not good click through rate but no risk of bad UX and income loss)
Sales seem to be happy with this suggestion and I am happy to implement this because this seems like a simpler and smarter way! Thank you for reading this story and I hope you know more about me =)
Stripe always comes to my mind when people are discussing API documentation. I had a super smooth experience (clear documentation, superb testing environment) while I work with a startup to integrate Stripe. Stripe documentation has been one of my favourite websites to learn how to build restful API. I believe if I work in Stripe, by leveraging the fundamentals of Stripe's excellent platform, I can solve many more problems to make this world a better place.