I never thought that I would work for one company for so long LOL. I’ve been working for more than 11 years. Of course, there was time; things didn’t work as expected, but still, life must go on. My company, where I work right now, is evolving, from a startup become an enterprise company that already has its own stock on the Indonesia Stock Exchange. Even though people talk about my company as a successful tech company (in Indonesia) but it doesn’t mean it never goes up and down. Let me tell you the story of a person who has already worked for a long time in Tiket, when we didn’t know how to lock the GitHub repository, and deployed the monolith without CI/CD and many dark things that have never been told before as a tech company.
By the way, even though the title is discussing the Tech, I would share about the product journey as well. You’ll get shocked about the harsh truth LOL.
We will be back when I first joined Tiket
2014
At this time, I was interviewed using a single pen and a piece of paper. Someone who I didn’t know came to the room and said, “Please work on this task, and I will be back 10 minutes later.” The task she gave me was a Fizz Buzz Test. Okay, I did the task in less than 5 minutes, and someone came, which actually the manager. He introduced himself and said, “Okay, you’re hired.” What a joke LOL.
Now, forget about the simple hiring process; I will tell you about the onboarding. When I came to the office on the first day, there was no onboarding, and the manager who hired me even forgot about me LOL. He just said, Please go to another manager, and ask them what I need to do. What a fantastic experience. During the first day, the manager asked me to clone the repo of Tiket.com. Do you know how big the repository?
It’s a 3 GB size of repository, like WT*. Did they push a 3GP film there? LOL
After I cloned the repo, I asked how to run the program on the localhost. Do you know what the people say? “We have never worked on it locally, as the code was too big and it would never be loaded.” Like another WT* moment.
The next day, I was appointed as the engineer who would work on the finance and payment team. There was a moment when the CTO came to my desk and asked me to check the production bugs. He said, “There was a bug, please help to find and fix it. Thanks, bro.” Like, WT*, I just onboarded for only 2 days, and you asked me to solve a bug, which, until now, I didn’t know how to run the application locally.
So the illustration of onboarding during my probation time:
Back again to run the application locally, this was my first time running localhost through the virtual host. Instead of using http://localhost, we used http://ww.tiket.com. If you want to know how to set it up, you can check here. I’ll not share the details as you can Google it by yourself or ask directly to Gemini or ChatGPT. But still, I can’t run it properly, even for opening the homepage. There was an issue with the database. When I requested database access, the infra guy gave me the production access, which is called zeus04.tiket.com (it’s already been deprecated for a long time). The lead engineer who worked with me said to clone the schema and some master data from there, like dude, “how do I know which master data I need to clone?” Since this was a madness onboarding, I directly used the credentials I received for running the application locally, and Voila, I can open the ww.tiket.com locally without any error. What madness to run the local environment using a production database.
Now, move on to the project, I was assigned to the task, and already done with the development itself. Usually, in my previous company, I did my testing by myself and uploaded it directly to the company’s web hosting. Here, someone will do the testing, which I was impressed by. Tiket has a position called the QA, who will test the application before it’s shared with the business team. In order to do the test, I need to request the manager to merge the code to the stage branch, and then he needs to update it manually on the server. At that time, it was amazing, but if we do it in the current condition, we should be ashamed of that kind of manual things like that lol.
Testing was conducted in stage.tiket.com (it was decommissioned), after the QA said okay, then I could ask the manager to merge the code to the master and sync it again to production. The difference was in production; we had so many servers, which, until now, I don’t know how many servers we had during that time LOL.
What I learnt in the first year of working at Tiket:
- Understanding that I could use the virtual host. I never used that virtual host before.
- Using the MySQL editor for connecting to the database server. Previously, I always used phpMyAdmin, but clearly, if we did it for the Tiket database, it would take forever.
- Understanding how to create a separate branch in GitHub. Previously, I used GitHub, but I always did the coding in the master branch, never creating a separate branch before.
- Understanding the master & slave configuration database in Codeigniter. A long time ago, my previous boss asked about the same thing, but I never knew that it could be done.
What was the madness in the first year of working at Tiket:
- Absolutely, the onboarding process. It’s pretty absurd onboarding when the new onboard member didn’t know what to do next, and it happened for a long time. I would tell you separately.
- Production access. I still remember how I could use the production database to run my application locally, and nobody cares about that. Like dude, that’s a production database, it was good that the access was only for read, what if it could drop the database?
In 2014, we didn’t have the product team, so most of the requests from the business came from the business analyst team. So if someone mentioned that he/she were the product manager from Tiket during that period, it’s already b*llshit.
Lastly, you may ask, what’s the evolution you want to bring here? Dude, please, it’s just the first part, let’s follow my writing, and you will seethe tech company evolves from time to time, like a human itself.
