Engineering leadership: A server crash taught me this one critical lesson
My first program: Calculator messaging app
Bill Detwiler: What made you want to become a software engineer?
Ari Wilson: Well, it was when I was pretty young, actually. I saw, I think it was seventh grade, I saw “Triumph of the Nerds,” the documentary on PBS, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, sort of real life thing and I realized, hey, these are kind of my people, they're nerdy and they're getting things done and then they're using computers to do this. What are these computers doing? They're just like executing one thing at a time and always doing the same thing over and over again and you can really just get a lot done that way. It's pretty amazing actually.
Bill Detwiler: Do you remember that first line of code you ever wrote?
Ari Wilson: I do actually. So I was in seventh grade and I was on the school bus with my friend and we had this problem where we were on adjacent school buses at the time we didn't have phones or anything so we wanted to communicate with each other, but we did have these graphing calculators and you could use those to display a message really big, like zoom in on a piece of text and like really display that message really big and so we could communicate with each other, so that was a cool little... My first program.
Bill Detwiler: That is so cool. So, although I'm sure the work you're doing now is a little more complicated than that.
Ari Wilson: A little. A little.
Bringing Celonis EMS to everyone
Bill Detwiler: Tell me about some of those really interesting projects that you're working on right now.
Ari Wilson: Sure. We're trying to improve the way that people talk and deal with processes at their companies and increase their efficiency and then we're trying to bring the best of Celonis to everybody at these companies. Right now, it's sort of limited in scope to certain users and certain other folks and we want to bring it to everyone. That's our goal.
Bill Detwiler: And what do you like best, or maybe what do you, if not best and what do you just like about that type of work?
Ari Wilson: I think it's a couple of things, actually. I think there's sort of a big data element to it where you're looking at customers' data and trying to figure out sort of are there patterns that we can reuse to sort of help them answer their questions. There's also working closely with product and UX to sort of figure out what the best experience is for users who are not necessarily technical, who don't understand all the nitty gritty of the data and sort of figure out how we can present it in a way that really is actionable and useful for them in sort of a beautiful experience.
Bill Detwiler: What are some of the tough engineering, technical challenges that are also exciting that you're working on right now?
Ari Wilson: Sure. So I alluded to it a little bit before, but I think one of our biggest technical challenges with the new projects that we're working on is figuring out how to represent customer data in a sort of more general way, get a semantic understanding of customer data by looking at it at large scale, looking at it by examples and sort of building an inference engine that's able to understand that and answer customers, questions that they might have.
Vacation + server failure = learning experience
Bill Detwiler: And how have your past experiences helped prepare you to tackle that challenge?
Ari Wilson: Well, this is interesting, because I kind of have past experience in all of these areas of the data side. There's also a front end component to this, how do we display it? On the data side, I'll just mention, at my previous company, we worked with very large data and for six, seven, eight, nine years, long time and there was just so many ways that you could make assumptions about things being uniform that were actually not uniform and would result in things blowing up so I think one fun story is I went to Big Bear for a weekend and I was on call and I happened to get-
Bill Detwiler: A bold move by the way.
Ari Wilson: ... a page. Yes, yes.
Bill Detwiler: I've been on call and IT myself.
Ari Wilson: It was a bold play-
Bill Detwiler: Props, props for going on vacation, being on call.
Ari Wilson: And so we kind of exploded our memory to store all those different variations so I'm hoping to learn some lessons from that for Celonis…
Bill Detwiler: Yeah, it's sometimes you learn more, I think, from those hard lessons, right? Or those points of failure, it's what you take away from them that give you the most experience.
Ari Wilson: I tell people that they haven't been working hard enough if they haven't broken anything recently. And yeah, we give people a hard time about things like taking down the servers or whatever, but it's all in fun and it's a way that's how you learn that really these tough lessons about how actually systems operate.
Engineering a team where people are challenged and learning
Bill Detwiler: So tell me a little bit about how the team works together to tackle tough challenges?
Ari Wilson: So there's sort of two sides to this. I think first of all, like locally, within LA, we're building a great team here to take on these challenges and the other leaders that I work with now, we've had to combine 50 plus years of experience working together and there it's just a matter of trust and intuition and we sort of know when people have a problem with what's being said or what's going on, or they want to take things a different way.
Bill Detwiler: Yeah. So as someone who's both a software engineer and an engineering leader, what piece of advice would you give to new engineers for how they should approach tough technical challenges?
Ari Wilson: So two things. One is, I think you should always be willing to step outside your comfort zone. That's how I've always approached my career. To give some examples, I was asked to, well, I wasn't asked to, I actually came up with this, was we had an important priority feature. The product team was undergoing transition and there was nobody else left to do it but I took on the challenge of writing a requirements document for that feature, went and talked to customers, went and talked to sales, figured it out. Well, I'm not a product manager, but somebody has to figure this stuff out and that was a growing experience for me and contributed to some of my later contributions on the product side.
Ari Wilson: The other thing I'd say is just always be learning. If you're in a role where you're not challenged, not learning, not always taking on these tough challenges, you need to find a better role for yourself and advocate for yourself in that regards and that's how I've tried to work with folks that I, work with folks.
