My name is Jauhar Arifin. I’m just yet another software engineer interested in compiler design and distributed systems and trying to learn new things everyday. You can find me on GitHub, X or send me an email.

My Journey To Programming

I used to do competitive programming. I won a silver medal in Indonesia National Science Olympiad back in 2014 when I was in high school and this was one of the most influential milestones in my software engineering journey. During college, I used to teach competitive programming and a little math. Teaching was quite challenging experience. Teaching makes you think about the subject more deeply and make you realize that there are a lot of things that you don’t know. I also wrote a book about competitive programming, but unfortunately it never really officially published. Even though now I don’t do competitive programming as often, I still enjoy an occasional competitive programming puzzles.

I work professionally as web developer, and mostly backend. I did work on frontend before, but not for a long time. I spend most of my work experience working as backend web developer. Even though I was a web backend guy, I actually really interested on compilers, database systems, and graphics. I’m not an expert in all of those area and never really work professionally on those area. This is partly because there are not a lot of demand for compiler engineer, database engineer or graphic engineer in Indonesia. People here don’t really interested building their own programming language or database.

As a hobby, I often write open source projects. Some of the projects that I’m quite proud of are:

• Gomocker is a tool to generate Golang code to mock an interface or function. This tool works quite well and was used quite extensively by my team at Shopee. One good thing about this tool is that it doesn’t require any third party library. The generated code is self-contained and only require Go standard library.
• Magelang is a programming language targetting WebAssembly written in Rust. This language is bascially like a simpler version of C that can target only WebAssebly.
• Flappybird is just a flappy bird clone written in Magelang.
• Magnes is a NES emulator written in Magelang.
• Redirs is a simple clone of Redis that only implement GET and SET command and written in Rust.

Professional Experiences

1. Backend Engineering Intern at Traveloka (June - August 2017).
   • Created accommodation service for pricing. The detail of the project is confidential.
2. Backend Engineering Intern at Dekoruma (May - August 2018).
   • Created task automation for interior design projects using Django
   • This feature automates the interior design pipeline process which was done manually.
3. Software Engineer Part Time at GDP Labs (February - April 2019).
   • Worked on the online judge system called TLX (https://tlx.toki.id/). This website is used to host competitive programming competitions and the national computer olympiad in Indonesia.
   • Added improvement on quiz page using JS with React framework.
4. Senior Software Engineer at Shopee Singapore (August 2019 - June 2022)
   • Worked in Checkout Backend Team.
   • Worked on a lot of features related to the checkout product line.
   • Migrated the whole checkout code base from Python to Golang.
   • Built a bunch of code generator tools to improve developers’ productivity.
   • Performed a tech talk about code generation techniques used by Checkout Team.
   • Wrote a common library for handling API calls, concurrency, logging, and metrics collection.
   • Wrote a custom in-memory cache by using off-heap memory to reduce GC overhead from Golang.
5. Software Engineer at Sembly (August 2022 - Now)