Senior Software Engineer, Melbourne
Tony Yang
I build software that does the boring work, so people can spend their day on the work only they can do.
More than ten years of this. Mostly cloud systems, automation and reliability.
The same thing, in every job
In every job I have had, I found people doing the same task by hand.
The same report, every week. The same numbers, copied between two systems. The same steps, in the same order, forever.
Nobody planned this. The work built up, one small task at a time.
So I build the thing that does it.
What that looks like
5.5 hours to 7 seconds
A ranking task at StreetVoice took five and a half hours to run. I rebuilt it.
6x faster releases
A team of ten at ThroughTek released their software by hand. I led the move to automated releases.
Up to 100x fewer resources
Old telecom services at M800 used too much of the machine. I rebuilt them in Go.
None of this was clever. It was work that nobody had done yet.
Machines are only half of it
Sometimes the fastest fix is to teach someone.
At 104, a jobs website in Taiwan, I ran more than ten workshops, so teams could use the new cloud tools without me.
At Ackama I trained seven engineers in Kubernetes.
The goal is a team that does not need me.
Outside work
I volunteer with Beach Patrol and Love Our Street in Melbourne. I am now an assistant volunteer lead.
I help clean beaches and streets across the city's south-east.
At Port Melbourne I joined more than fifty volunteers to remove over 325 kg of invasive sea stars.
It is slow work. It still has to be done.