Humans of Kontinentalist: Arnold

Hey Arnold, what’s your role at Kontinentalist?

I’m a full-stack developer. I’m responsible for maintaining our website and content management products and converting designs — such as web page styling and layout, or stories — into clickable buttons or components. I also help Rifqi, our dev lead, manage our website’s back-end and infrastructure in Amazon Web Services.

Could you talk briefly about your background and why you decided to join us?

Sure. I have a software engineering background. Previously, I worked as a full-stack software engineer in a travel startup in my home country, Indonesia. It was one of the unicorns in Southeast Asia — Traveloka. But most of my projects back then were related to server maintenance or, perhaps more technically, API. I also dealt with some front-end stuff related to the CMS of our internal tools, including admin tools.

I’m also a private tutor for high school students who want to learn about programming or, more specifically, are interested in joining the Olympiad in Informatics in Indonesia. So that’s a bit of my background in tech.

I decided to join Konti for a few reasons. First, I wanted to try working abroad to gain new experiences and perhaps make new friends as well.

As to why I didn’t join other overseas tech companies — software wise, I’m interested in Konti’s focus on data visualization and data stories. When I applied, I thought to myself, “Wow, this is so cool. How do you guys collect data and render it using libraries such as d3 to make it visually appealing for readers?” So I wanted to learn the process behind it, especially the coding or creation steps.