Kristian Lead Software Engineer

When did you decide to become a software engineer?

I first knew I wanted to be an engineer at age 8, when my dad brought home our first computer. It had a lot of buttons, each of which did something different, and I was always interested in things with buttons. A friend of mine and I thought it would be cool to see what we could generate with the computer’s typesetting capabilities, which were pretty primitive, so we started a neighborhood newspaper. I think we published 20 editions over the course of a year.

When did you actually start programming?

In high school, I programmed the game ‘rock, paper, scissors’ onto my programmable calculator in BASIC. I copied the program onto my friends’ calculators so we all could play.

My first computer programming challenge was to develop a reservation system for LAN parties I organized with three friends. Participants brought their computers, hooked up to a network, and played in game tournaments. This was in the pre-internet era. We ran the parties from Friday afternoon through Sunday evening in the school gymnasium.

The reservation system I programmed enabled participants—there were 130 of them—to select teams and track their performance. The code was absolutely terrible. I used a book on the C programming language to write it. The book was designed to teach a language, not how to program, so it was trial and error. I made all the mistakes in the book. There was no structure to my code—it was complete spaghetti—but it worked.

How did you go from programming as a hobby to programming as a career?

When I first competed in a programming challenge, the fall of my second year of college, I really became interested in programming as an art and in how to write good, efficient code. That year, and every year of college after that, I competed successfully in the Norwegian Programming Championship, then advanced to the Northwestern Europe ACM programming competition.

After college, I decided to pursue a master’s degree. My master’s thesis was on the use of GPU functionality in volume rendering. I actually wrote a blog during that project.

How did you end up at Medallia?

I was in the middle of applying to a PhD program in Austria, which would have allowed me to keep working with the 3-D computer graphics technologies I’d used for my master’s thesis. It was attractive, but when I compared it to the alternative of working for a company with a lot of very smart people, suddenly there were a lot of cons.

What do you do at Medallia?

I am architecting Medallia’s next-generation platform. We started the project completely from scratch, which was a dream come true. In previous jobs, I’d always been thrown into ongoing projects. When we began, our team sat in our corner building the platform. There was very little pressure, as no one was actually using the system. Of course, it’s fun now that people have started using it, but you do have to support it.

What is your biggest challenge on the job?

All of my challenges are related to growth. The biggest technical challenge is system scalability: You get to the point where you’ve gotten something to work, but then you have to scale it. One example is data. We’re in the business of collecting and processing data, so we handle a lot of it. Once all of it no longer fits in memory at the same time, that’s when things get more difficult—and more interesting. But fortunately we get a big payback from designing good, modular architecture; it’s pretty straightforward to swap out parts of the system that can’t handle increased load. I’ve made performance enhancements, to handle millions of records, in just a matter of days. This need to scale is going to continue—there are a lot of upgrades going up, lots of new clients coming on, tons of different requests.

Our engineering department is also growing, so coordinating efforts is an added challenge.

What do you like about your job?

Partly, it’s the little things, like when someone comes to you and asks, ‘Can we do this?’ Even though you haven’t considered the particular functionality before, you put two lines of code into the application, which has tens of thousands of lines of code, and suddenly the application has the desired functionality. That’s very satisfying.

Partly, it’s the big things. It’s very exciting going forward at Medallia. As people use our applications, usage looks like an exponential curve. If that continues, the future looks very bright indeed.

What do you like about Medallia?

It’s a lot of fun for me. Even with the growth, Medallia’s still a small company, offering everything I like compared to working for a big company: The hierarchy is flat, there aren’t a lot of people above you, you get more responsibility and bigger challenges.

I like the people, too—they’re friendly, helpful, and very smart, so I learn a lot. The difference between how I programmed when I got here and today is night and day, in terms of both technical computer knowledge and how to work within a project group.

How do you like living in California?

I like it a lot—there are so many fun things to do right here. When I first arrived, the head of HR introduced new hires to indoor rock climbing, and I was hooked. I did that for a year. Now I’ve progressed to lead climbing, which is more advanced. I took up scuba diving here. I attended classes in San Carlos (California), went dry-suit diving in Monterey (California), and got my certification in Maui, my first time in Hawaii. Last summer I took up skydiving on a whim. I searched Google for a local place to do a tandem jump—that is, a jump with an instructor. After landing, my first question was ‘When can I sign up for classes?’ Since then, I’ve done more than 75 jumps and earned my B license, which allows me to do night jumps. I’m also 90 percent of the way to getting my pilot’s license. Ironically, the one thing I haven’t done in California is skiing, one of my main sports back home. But this year, I plan to ski in Tahoe.