An interview with Gwylim Ashley, Engineering

What’s the biggest difference between working at an Internet giant like Facebook and a startup like Alloy?

One of the biggest differences, as you might expect, is in the scope of work. At large companies, including Facebook, you’ll generally be working on smaller areas of the product. Most of the work you do as an individual will be more along the lines of small incremental improvements rather than large changes to how the product works, but the work you do will affect a large number of users.

Conversely, at startups, especially early stage ones like Alloy, the projects span many areas and you have the opportunity to really shape the direction of the product. It’s really exciting to have such a major impact and know that it probably wouldn’t have happened without you.

What’s the most exciting project you’ve worked on at Alloy?

The most interesting project I’ve worked on so far in my roughly seven months at Alloy has been demand forecasting. This is an important area that helps us go from passively reporting past data to making recommendations based on future predictions. It’s been a learning experience for me, since I learned a lot about different forecasting methods that I was previously unfamiliar with, such as ARIMA and ETS. It has also been an interesting technical challenge to scale up forecasting to hundreds of thousands of time-series.

What first interested you in software engineering?

I first learned to program as a kid because I was interested in making games, but programming competitions were what really made me serious about computer science. I first took part in the national computer olympiad in high school and later the ACM ICPC in university. Not only did I learn a lot by preparing for competitions, but I also met a lot of great people, including the person who referred me to my job at Facebook.