Homemaker then Apple Engineer

Last updated: 8th March 2022 Filed under:

Introduction

During the global pandemic by COVID-19 my family had suffered from multiple events. School is closed, and kids have to stay at home since they are considered one of the most potential spreader for our communities. This broke our daily routine for sending kids school and back to work. Kids constantly demands our attentions, and we could not focus on work and house keeping tasks. This was devastating.

Abstract

I never imagined working in a bank as an software engineer since I graduated from school. I have been choosing technology companies, startups, or SaaS provider as my workplaces. FinTech ventures were often apprearing and trending in news feeds in 2016 to name Square, Stripe, Plaid, Mint, MoneyTree, LendingClub, and WealthSimple as examples. I was very curious about the FinTech because there are innovations happening even though financial businesses are heavily regulated and not easy to innovative. I want to understand what is happening with IT technologies for banks. Job landing on a bank is a new experience for me, and my first year is full of online and on-the-job trainings and some PoC projects and mentoring co-op students in my team. The first half of my second year was running and joining a series of hackathon events, and the other half was back to my typical enterprise architecture work. Third year was a special year since I got a chance to visit some of Silicon Valley technology companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook. It was also the year of the COVID-19 global pandemic started. My last year was full of COVID-19 related things and remote working shift.

Table of contents

  1. Landing on the job
  2. Onboarding to the team
  3. First Year
  4. Second Year
  5. Third Year
  6. Fourth Year
  7. Summary
  8. Next

Landing on the job

Landing on a new job is usually challenging in both good or bad ways. New work environments, new colleagues, and new tools are all exciting and stressful as well. Particulary the finance industry, it is a regulated industry and require a multiple onboarding step (Ex. A credit check and a rigorous work reference check.)

Call from TD recruiter

I was working on DevOps projects as a configuration management engineer in another company in 2016, and one day I got a direct email from a TD recruiter, and we talked about the opportunity available at TD to work on banking API and cloud architecture. I was excited to hear that since I was just certified as AWS cloud architect at that time, and I was seeking cloud architect jobs. It was just a best timing for me to take the opportunity, and I agreed to proceed following job interviews. Another fascinating aspect of the opportunity was that the employer is the one of big five banks in Canada, and it will certainly add some reputable experience on my career, and I wanted to learn the FinTech industry as well.

Interviews

The interviews were conducted by a phone call interview and multiple on-site. I had already seeing news from LinkedIn feed regarding the FinTech boom, and I know what's happening, but my understanding is very superficial. I did a little more research on why the FinTech gets so much attention. I didn’t prepare for typical coding exercises, but instead review my work history and its projects and deepen my understanding of system architectures. The actual technical interviews were not difficult. I was only asked a general software development lifecycle and some system architecture related questions. I didn't forget to introduce my previous work experiences with pain points of past projects and explained my approaches on how I fixed them.

Offer

The decision is made right after my last round interview, and I was confident that I did well in the interviews. I got notified the job offer next morning.

Onboarding to the team

TD is a typical Canadian banking corporation, and it requires financially credible person to join the organization since they deal with people’s money. I was required to go through some backgroud checks with a private agency which is responsible for my credit score and past employment history. It took a few weeks, and I was feeling a little nervous during that period. I was finally notified my official start date, and I was ready, set, and go to work.

On the job training

There was no formal orientation regarding my position on what to do in the line of business where I belong to except some online training courses which I was required to take for general bank employees. Everything else is a on-the-job training.

Getting to know other colleagues

My direct supervisor asked me if I want to be introduced to other colleagues via him, but I replied as I would go explore people by myself. This is because of my strategy to make myself known from the work I will commit not by a executive's general introduction, which is often forgettable by people. There was no formal orientation regarding my position on what to do within the line of business where I belong to except some online training courses which I was required to take for learning general bank employees common sense.

First Year

The first year was a mixtrue of trainings, some commitments from my skill set, and mentorship to juniors and co-op students. It is a literally catch-up year to ongoing projects;I needed understand the team’s business domain, areas to improve, strength, and their position in the line of business, Enterprise Architecture department. I was also trying to understand the team’s own responsibilties and goals so that I can make a plan on what commitments I can contribute to.

Most of my initial work was hands-on software development for supporting senior architects’ ongoing projects. While doing these supportive tasks, I had been studying general enterprise API architectures and their patterns with exploring unique enterprise requirements by interviewing and attending the weekly architecture review board meetings.

My supervisor had been working on setting the vision of the enterprise API architecture at that time, and I was initially helping him with my feedback on his PowerPoint deck regarding DevOps requirements.

Moving between offices - 100 Wellington West and 320 Front Street

The building I was working at did not accommodate the partnered engineering team who specializes in tooling API frameworks, and I often had to walk to the building for meetings and some senior managers for architecture planning.

Proof of concept projects

There were two major proof of concept (PoC) projects executed during 2017;The fault-tolerant JVM back-end API server and the QR code based mobile payment platform.

1. Fault-tolerant API PoC - Netflix Circuit Breaker Library

Resiliency and fault-tolerant were the major discussion topics which my supervisor and senior colleagues had been discussing at for the enterprise API framework. There was a well-engineered Java written software circuit-breaker available from Netflix's open source projects, and I utilized it to implement that feature into the enterprise API framework. It actually worked quite well for the PoC purpose, and the software circuit-breaker came with the dashboard feature which enables us to visually observe the incoming API requests to the API framework and how the errorneous API requests are handled by the circuit-breaker as well.

2. United Way Pay PoC

TD has been supporting the United Way, a charity organization, and my department started a department-wide charity campaign for them every year. My supervisor made a partnership with another enterprise payment team, and we started building a mobile payment platform for collecting donations.

This mobile payment platform had some strategic requirements even though it is a proof of concept product. The mobile payment platform utilize the current developing fault-tolerant, authentication, and authorization API architecture.

My responsibility was software development of an embedded iOS library in Objective-C as a part of the entire web API security framework for the iOS client application. The most iOS applications in the market were already developed in Swift language at that time, but some encryption libraries of our proof of concept project requires making access to iOS core functionalities, which were only available to Objective-C. There were not helpful documents of how to utilize the libraries, and I had to extremely struggle with them.

The mobile payment platform is conneceted to production fund transfer API, and its backend system can move the users' real money from their chequing account to the United Way campaign's designated bank account within the TD bank network. The employees who registered on the mobile payment platform made payments as donations for the United Way campaign.

Co-op students

There were two co-op students who joined in 2017. One is from the University of Waterloo who helped us to execute our fault-tolerant API server project. The other one is from Ryerson University who also worked together for the United Way campaign project. Both of them are very energized and held a strong curiosity for technologies. They learned a lot and gained a substantial experience with the team, and both co-op students went to work for another reputable companies as software engineer upon their graduation.

Second Year

The second year is the year for deepening my understanding of the unique enterprise requirements in the enterprise API client authentication and authorization. One day in 2018, my supervisor gathered senior team members and I, and we started a series of case-study based discussions and trainings on how to judge good and bad enterprise API architectures. The team eventually finalized a general basic model template for building API architecture in a solutions architecture blueprint.

While working on these discussions and trainings, I had started getting API architecture consulting works from solutions architects. These consulting works are the best cases which I can apply the modeled template to enforce the architecture standards. I was also assigned to join the weekly architecture review board meetings. It is a meeting to review every solution architecture proposed in TD, and I gained an enormous amount of knowledge from the meetings.

The virtual online banking platform - TD DaVinci

There were many hackathon events hosted in 2018 from small to large corporations. TD was also hosting internal hackathon events for its junior employees. Our API architecture team was responsible for building the virtual online banking platform which is simulating a production TD online banking website. The virtual online banking platform has some strategic requirements to prove the developing API architectures. One of the requirements is an integration with GitHub account and utilization of the associated user tokens to authenticate and authorize the users' interaction with the virtual online banking platform. The choice of the GitHub is because it implemented the OpenID Connect(OIDC) for its users' identity federation. This attempt is to experiment the utilization of the GitHub as an OIDC enabled identity federation service since the bank also plans to move to OIDC authorization services. Another requirement is to build a developer API portal with a collection of APIs to enable developers to programmtically access to the virtual online banking platform. This is for the future when open banking is available;where developers freely create financial client applications to expland FinTech market.

https://api.github.com/users/GITHUB_USER_NAME

Hackathon - TD internal corporate hackathon

The internal corporate hackathon event went to 3 days in a row, and there were about 30 teams joined from the all junior employees. They came up with a variety of financial applications developed based on our virtual banking APIs. I was sitting with them and provided occasional supports for configuration and coding their services.

Hackathon - Hack The North - Working in Pivotal (Acquired by VMWare) Toronto office

There is a biggest hackathon event in Canada called Hack The North. My team was registered to host the same virtual online banking platform, and this is more professional environment so we decided to hire software consulting company called Pivotal to help us polish our front-end look and feel. The Pivotal accommodated us to work from their office, and I really enjoyed working there. On the day of the hackathon event, there are many other hosts appeared with their booths; Google and RBC are just a few of them. We actually surpassed the other bank competitor by the number of attendees' hackathon applications built on our platform. There was actually one accident happened on the hackathon competition day. There was a small JavaScript code bug on the front-end application and the virtual banking transaction data are misdisplayed. I quickly fixed the bug, tested on the staging environment, and asked my supervisor if I can deploy the fix. My supervisor was a little reluctant to do so because the production is already up and run, and many users are actively making access to it. I confirmed with my supervisor that we can easily and quickly roll back the change if anything goes wrong. Then, we deployed the fix to the production...It's all fixed right away!

Hackathon - Eleven

There was another hackathon event as well, and it was the Elevate Hackathon hosted at MARS by TD, an innovation centre to host startups or spin-offs from major internet service companies like Facebook and AirBnB who has been developing innovative services.

Google Canada - Waterloo office

At the end of October 2019, I went to see my mentor who used to be my direct supervisor at Research In Motion (RIM), which is BlackBerry now. He moved to Google after his tenure at BlackBerry, and he has been working there until now. One day, he messaged me through LinkedIn if I am interested to visit Google Waterloo office. It has been 10 years to see him, and we talked our past projects at RIM and our coworkers. Most coworkers moved to GAFA or simply Silicon Valley. It was a refreshing time to remember what I worked with him.

TD Associates - Juniors

Three TD associates joined our team during their rotation program, which enables them to pick up four different teams to work in TD every six months. One lady is very social and hold a strong leadership skill, one gentleman is very strong in coding, and the last lady was on the focus of UI/UX design. They were all doing well, and they eventually joined another reputable companies.

Vim Toronto meetup

One of the TD associates who used to work for the Ryerson DMZ, and she helped me to host a technology learning meetup. The meetup is about learning vim, one of the software development tools based on the command line and well know for a not easy to learn thing.

Third Year

Work environment change

The third-year was a special year because of a series of work environment changes. At first the virtual online banking platform team was back from Pivotal office. Second, all juniors in the team left TD by their will. Third, my supervisor who hired me left TD. Then, my team was merged into another team. I outlined the team activities for the next supervisor, and I worked to support the relationships between the new supervisor and my team. During the period of these changes, I kept receiving the API architecture consulting works more and more, and I started becoming a trusted subject matter expert for many TD solutions architects. Though these changes were stressful, I was able to spend more time on API architecture consulting works, one of which is API client on-boarding for internal and external system integration with enterprise APIs.

API Client Onboarding

The API client onboarding is a series of processes to enable an internal or external client software to access to a server which hosts an enterprise financial system resources through the API which acts as an interface between two systems for their integration. The criticalness of the integration exists at authentication and authorization between the API clients and servers. Any enterprise system do not want to accept unauthorized access by unauthenticated users. To avoid that, most companies have defined security frameworks. I was particulary responsible for the OAuth2.0 grant types selections.

Hybrid Architecture of internal and external(third-party/vendor/SaaS) microservices - API Client Onboarding

One solution architecture is presented. The front-end UI/UX is identical, but the back-end is composed by the mixtrue of internal enterprise middleware by enterprise APIs and vendor SaaS APIs.

API Architecture Pattern

In parallel to my regular consulting work, I developed a new enterprise API architecture pattern called the Adapter API pattern which is an API server implementation pattern for point to point data mapping integration between two systems when they use different communication protocol for each other. One good example is a conversion between SOAP XML payload and RESTful JSON payload. One system only uses SOAP XML format to transfer data, and the other system only expects RESTful HTTPS JSON format as an input. The Adapter API server will be an agent between them to enable their communications. The difficult part of this API architecture pattern is the fact that there are many different types of existing systems who are already connected each other without implementing the Adapter API pattern. The time and cost is an issue, and once this API architecture pattern is enforced, then many existing solution designs need to be updated. This is overwelmed. The Adapter API pattern needs a strategy on how to update the existing systems with the Adapter API pattern.

Architecture Review Board

In third year, I secured my chair in the architecture review board members for API architecture domain in the following line of businesses:Wealth, Insrance, Securities, and Credit Card (WISC). Compared to typical core banking domains like retail banking, WISC domains have more flexibilities in solutions design, and this flexibility made me complicated to perform architecture scoring in the architecture review board meeting. The WISC business requirements are moving quickly and changing dynamically by which architecture patterns sometimes cannot be enforced.

Another patent filed for TD Insurance business solution

Beside my regular work, I had been working with another senior architect to design an IoT business solution. The other senior architect is specialized for designing big data platform, and I am for API architecture of the exposing parts of the big data solutions which is enabled by collecting data from smart homes equipped sensors. We filed this solution architecture as a patent and successfully filed to be pending for granted.

Process improvement for the API client onboarding

The API Client Onboarding is part of the entire new enterprise API creation process or updating process when an API client updated in an exsiting solutions architecture. One of most difficult requirement is the selection of OAuth2.0 grant types to secure API access. There are not too many selections to pick up, and solutions architects never get into trouble by that, but instead the justification of the choice is very difficult. By the order of the frequency to pick up the grant type, it is usually Client Credentials grant type for most cases. Then, Authorization code grant type comes second. Rest of solution designs are mostly falling into Resource Owner Password Credentials (ROPC) and Implicit grant types. These two grant types have only very limited usages, and they are not major choice. It is probably not difficult to choose either Client Credentials or Authorization code grant type, but the problem exists at their granular use cases. Authorization code grant type is the best choice because it is most secured design grant type, but there is an implementation cost for engineers. Client Credentials grant type is easier to implement and engineering cost is low, but less secured compared to the Authorization code grant type. The difference between the Authorization code and Client Credentials is the involvement of the end user to acknowledge the delegation of their identity to the requested authorization service (Ex. Identity provider (IdP) like Auth0, Okta, and PingIdentity). The end user is prompted to acknowledge if they agree to do so, and otherwise the authorization is voided. Client Credentials skips that step, and no end user interaction is required. It sounds simple if no end user interaction is required, but the problem is that we cannot assure that the API client is compromised since the credentials stays permanent. For this reason, the Authorization code grant type is recommeded. The granular use cases are following below as a list when Client Credentials is still the choice even though the Authorization code grant type is better. The granular use cases list accompany with the choice of OAuth2.0 grant types. This list saved so much time for solutions architects.

Google Cloud Hackathon at Montreal in 2019

One of my colleagues in TD who I wored together for the United Way campaign invited me to join the hackathon event hosted by Google in Montreal. The hackathon is about development of the solutions utilizing Google Cloud Platform. There are two requirements to be qualified for the competition;One is showing the target state of the solution architecture, and the solution must utilize the provided data sets.

Google Cloud NeXT Event in 2019

There is an annual event hosted by Google Cloud team as NeXT'19 for the year in San Francisco, and one of my colleagues invited me to the event. It was running one week long, and we stayed one of my friends house in Campbell, California.

Visit Apple Campus in Cupertino, California

During my staying at Campbell, my frind who let myself and my colleague stay at his house took me to his workplace, one of Apple campus and their headquarter at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino.

AWS Re:Inforce in 2019

AWS launched a new cloud computing conference to focus on its security technologies as the re:Inforce event in 2019. The first one was held at Boston, MA, and I went to there by myself with the purchase of over $1,000 CDN expensive ticket, flight ticket, and AirBnB booking as well. There were dozens of live sessions, and I deliberately choose API platform and its authentication and authorization technologies to see the next trends of API platform security. It was an inagural event from AWS, and I expected many buzz words and non-technical people gathering for recruiting engineers, but surprisingly the event was full of skilled engineers and I learned a lot there.

COVID-19 pandemic started

Around November in 2019, there were news reporting the pandemic of the COVID-19 on TV, and it was a beginning of the whole global pandemic. I didn't realize how hard and serious the pandemic is until the first lockdown of the entire province of my residence.

Fourth Year

I entered my fourth year in 2020, and by the time I gained much experience by reviewing and helping hundreds of solution architectures through architecture review board meetings and ad-hoc API architecture consulting works. I sometimes redesigned the solution architectures to help the solutions architects to let them know how their solutions can comply to the enterprise architecture standards.

Cloud Native Enterprise API Architecture

One of the major enterprise API architecture work is to develop and enhance the enterprise API frameworks in multiple domains. A most basic enterprise API framework has general requirements to be secured by OAuth2 and being enabled to be observable by enterprise logging tools and emitting metrics as streaming data. Since the enterprise is getting adjusted to cloud native environment, the enterprise API framework is also required to equip cloud native features. One of the features is to embed the Web API SDKs from the major cloud platform. By embedding the cloud SDK/Web API library into the API framework, the framework can delegate some of its basic functionalities to the cloud service providers. There is a risk to be dependent on the cloud service provider/software as a service (SaaS) solutions. To mitigate the risk, the mutually agreed service level agreement (SLA) is required before their integration. In general, the SLA is calculated by multiplication of the series of the enterprise services integrated together as an SLA guaranteed service. 

The actual SLA of the solution = Internet reliability (99.999%) *
  service A (internal hosted app - 99.999%) *
  service B (internal hosted third party COTS App - 99.99%) *
  service C (external hosted SaaS - 99.99%) *
  service D (in-house app deployed into a major cloud platform - 99.999%)
  = 99.999% * 99.999% * 99.99% * 99.99% * 99.999%
  = 99.977%

COVID-19

After an early few months had passed in 2020, and the COVID-19 issues getting global and worse with multiple nation-wide lockdown orders from Canadian government. I have to start something new which add a value to TD. The value will be an asset in TD, and it will grow their businesses. I created a list below for the value-added activities. Review the current TD API program to update with the latest technologies and new roadmaps. Refine architectural questions to interview solution designers for API client onboarding for their system integration projects and the architectural questions should reduce the amount of communication and backup more time for Enterprise Architects to focus on new architecture development. Develop a cloud native API architecture for existing enterprise API frameworks to utilize major public cloud SDK and the public cloud SDK should replace the current API framework lock-in features with public cloud services this will minimize the maintenance labour and cost for the API framework. The API framework developers can spend more time for designing new API framework features. Develop a patentable API architecture for home insurance domain Obtain Azure Cloud Architect certificate

Remote work

Once the headquarter office decided to put all employees work from home except the essential service domains like customer services for branch and retail banking.

Family emergency

During the period of the work-from-home style enforced, I had a family emergency which really disrupted my business continuity.

Reorganization

Executives told us that they will keep the existing employees job security during 2020, but they will not for 2021. There were multiple rounds of layoffs from all over the line of businesses in the beginning of 2021. We also got new chief architect for the enterprise architecture, and the lady was trying to lay down some new foundations of architectural standards.

Burnt out...and layoff

The working from home was exciting at first few months until the school is shutdown and my kids started staying at home all the time with online learning via computers. Please imagine that five-year-old girl watching the computer screen all day long for learning something from the virtual teachers...It might work for some parts, but I honestly don't agree this remote learning environment. This is because kids learning through their five senses from all their body parts:Listening live voices, reading paper books with their hands, write down something they want to express in white papers, and speak someone in front of their faces. Taking care of kids and family while working on the computers at home is quite difficult. There are some people saying living and working from home alone is also not easy, but for sure having a whole family at home is more tough. Dogs and cats also need some cares, but kids as human beings are privileged to get more cares, and they can demand as they want. It was just so much hard for me to continue working as I used to be under such a pressure to hold my job. It eventually came to my turn to be laid off from the work, and some other teammates as well. What I found was that my other teammates were the same family structure as I have. All of us have kids at home.

Summary

This is a short history of my last four years at TD. It is very personal and maybe not relevant to general readers, but I hope my experiences and some technical aspects regarding software architect career can help you decide to go this path. If so, we will cross in the road in the near future.

Next

I have some plans to continue to brush up my skill set, and I am looking for next opportunity to utilize them. The followings are some of them.