• I joined Umbo in June 2018 as a backend engineer in the TruePlatform team, a team in charge of the development of web platforms and video streaming services at the time. I was in charge of product development and maintaining Web servers (Node.js) and database systems (MongoDB & MySQL) at the very beginning.
• After getting familiar with the development process in the team, I tried to take more responsibilities on infrastructure. Therefore, I started to pick up the engineering practices of AWS and the cloud-native environments and then optimized our team's architecture patterns by the learned practices.
• I did several achievements at the time, such as adopting the sidecar pattern to our legacy streaming services to reduce network traffic and adopting object-tagging on our S3 buckets to reduce storage costs.
• After finished several optimization projects, I was promoted to a senior backend engineer in the TruePlatform team in July 2019. And my responsibilities included not only product development but also system design and optimization at the time.
• In later 2019, with the growth of Umbo's business, our systems started to face some scalability and performance issues under the original software architecture. Therefore, I put my best efforts into leading members to improve our system capabilities in the following months.
• I did several achievements at the time, such as solving unscalable and unbalancing issues on our old WebSocket server and optimizing database use patterns to reducing query latencies for some heavy-loading dashboards.
• After leading several successful projects, I got an opportunity to lead a big project - Event-Filter in Feb. 2020, which was Umbo's new product for monitoring station customers. I was the tech lead and software architect of the project. My main responsibilities were software architecture and cross-team communication to ensure integration between teams working well and the product delivering on time. As a result, we successfully released the MVP version in 1 month (March 2020), and Event-Filter became our most successful product so far (63% personnel cost & 83% filter rate).
• Event-Filter is designed to optimize customers' human resources on their monitoring stations by filtering out false alarms generated from their own devices/systems. The idea is that customers can integrate their cameras or systems with Umbo's Event-Filter. Then, when any possible alarms are generated in the cameras/systems, those alarms will be forwarded to Event-Filter. Then, our internal A.I. solutions would help customers filter out false alarms and only forward the real ones back to customers. Therefore, customers don't need to take care of many alarms and focus on the real important events.
• In Sep. 2020, after Event-Filter became much mature and stable, I was assigned to help another engineering team LightCloud reduce their product costs on AWS.
• I did several achievements at the time, such as tagging-based S3 objects, per-zone ASG, NAT-free reduction, and turning HitL related algorithms.
• Through Event-Filter and the cost optimization projects, I had proved my engineering skills, leadership, and cross-team functionalities to the company. Therefore, I was promoted to a staff software engineer in March 2021. And my new responsibilities were cross-team tech management and software architecture, especially leading and supporting teams to reduce product costs.
• As a result, we successfully improved the overall product margin from 15.4% to 67.1% within 9 months (Sep 2020 - May 2021), reducing 66% HitL cost and 54% AWS cost.
• Unfortunately, although we had done our best on cost reduction, Umbo still could not overcome financial issues and reach break-even in time. Therefore, the company was bankrupt at the end of Aug 2021. That was the end of my Umbo journey.