Tonight, we had dinner with E and D, a couple in their early 50s who have been in the United States for more than a decade. I had a great time listening to their different versions of love at first sight stories.

More than ten years ago, they fell in love at first sight in New Zealand and got married. Later, Mr. D found a job in the United States, and they immigrated here.

D likes to tell the story of the first time he met E in New Zealand: “My friend and I went to an indoor rock climbing club. As soon as we entered the climbing area, I saw E hanging high on the climbing wall and everyone below was looking up and chanting for her. E didn’t reach the top and almost fell into my arms. I fell in love with her at that moment.” D added: “Oh, my friend happened to know E.”

Watching a successful career gentleman vividly describing the details of love at first sight from more than ten years ago, in front of his loving wife, I felt like I were there watching E climb too, and happiness seemed spread instantly around us. I couldn’t help but clap my hands and asked E who was sitting next to D: “Do you remember those details?”

E smiled sweetly and said: ” I don’t remember it, this is his version.”

I told E sincerely: “From the way he described the scene of your first time meet, I can tell that he still loves you fondly.”

E quickly looked at D sitting next to her and said with the same sweet smile: “He didn’t mention how he was looked back then. He had long hair that went past his waist, a goatee under his chin, and big earrings.”

I immediately turned my head to look at D, who was still looking at E happily. I saw a typical Western male scholar, with silver-gray hair cut short, wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a dark and light blue checkered shirt. The D in front of me has no trace of what E just described. Of course, I couldn’t get close enough to see his ear holes. I half-jokingly said to E: “Woo, You tamed him very successfully!”

My daughter who sat face to E said to me: “Mom, how can you say that?”

I quickly added: “You two are soulmates, destined to be together in life!”

E nodded and said: “Yes.”

E and D continued talking about their uniqueness. As E’s father is a very traditional Asian man, D had to cut his long hair, shave his beard, take off the earrings, and learn Asian etiquette before he went to meet his future father-in-law and asked for permission to marry his daughter. D happily demonstrated to us how to pass a teacup with one hand while being held by another hand, and I immediately noticed that D’s posture of teacup holding is different from the Chinese posture of using both hands to hold the teacup.

I curiously asked E whether she liked the United States or New Zealand. She said she liked the simple and natural New Zealand: “The birds in New Zealand are very simple, brown and yellow-brown, not as gorgeous and colorful as the birds in our neighboring Australia.” But she doesn’t feel that she belongs to New Zealand because there are very few Asians at that time; in this regard, she prefers Silicon Valley in the United States. She said that when she goes to a restaurant with her friends, she often feels like she was back in her motherland because of the food and the people sitting with her. She added with a smile: “When D eats with us, and he is usually the only white.”

Thanks to the diverse and inclusive culture of Silicon Valley, I experienced the exotic customs and practices with personal views at home.

Little Episodes

1. New Zealand’s birds are simple, brown and yellow-brown, not as colorful as their neighbor Australia’s birds.

2. Our dinner table, E and D have had a pet “Toto” for seven years. He is very well-behaved and comfortable around children, so both of our little ones love Toto very much.

On Saturday, my daughter and her family attended her company Accell’s annual outdoor lunch party for the first time. This was a family event so she signed up for me too. Before attending, I was already excited, as this would be the second time I enjoy the Silicon Valley company culture of eating and playing benefits, after returning to California from Massachusetts. The first time was with Alex, enjoying the NVIDIA Hardware Engineering Division’s Potluck Party.

The party was held at a large park in Fremont. On Saturday morning, my daughter planned to leave home early enough to arrive at the Fremont park at 11:00 am. Being a “two under two” young family, it was very difficult to follow a timed schedule, so we got out late and naturally arrived at the park later than planned. From the parking lot to the lunch party, we had to cross the park. My daughter led the way and pushed Meimei, our baby girl, on the paved pathway in a hurry, as she felt that it was not good to be later than what she said. The paved pathway in the park was in an arc shape, Ben, Alex, and I followed my daughter and took a shortcut on the lawn. There were not many trees on the lawn under the scorching sun, and Ben walked very slow on the uneven lawn, struggling with one step high and another step low. To avoid Ben being sunburnt, Alex picked Ben up and carried him on his shoulder, rotating left shoulder to right shoulder and backwards. Ben laid on his father’s shoulders without making any noise, as if he was enjoying this unusual way of laying horizontal moving forward.

The lunch party was settled in a large shady area under several large trees, so people can sit together eating, chatting, playing, and rest, without having to scatter for shade. I thought that the organizer was very thoughtful on choosing this area.

Today’s lunch main course was Mexican cuisine, served by a Mexican chef, a big man in a black uniform. The chef was standing next to a barbecue grill flipping soft tacos about 3 cm in diameter and cheese quesadillas about 6 cm in diameter on the flat grill pan. There were also two pots of traditional Mexican food on the pan, cooked beans and fried rice. Three large pots of cooked ground meat: chicken, beef and pork were on the side of the flat grill pan. Before eating, we lined up to order our own taco or quesadilla from the chef, then went to a nearby table to add spicy sauce, diced onions, cucumber slices, and/or tomato slices, etc, for additional flavors.

As my daughter was taking care of Meimei and Alex was in charge of Ben, so I was fully enjoying my free lunch. I went to the chef three times and ordered three different cheese quesadilla, with just beef, with just pork, and without anything. I added a small amount of diced onions, cucumber slices, tomato slices, and spicy sauce for each quesadilla I ordered. Because the quesadilla is big and the filling is small, I rolled the quesadilla tightly into a thin stick and ate it slowly, I enjoyed every bit of it, as the quesadillas were chewy with layered flavors. I felt very full after finishing three quesadillas, as I also drank a lot of my favorite Mexican soft drink, Horchata, a sweet rice milk beverage that is usually made out of rice, milk, vanilla, sugar, and cinnamon. I thought today’s Mexican meal was very authentic and tasty. Later, someone brought several tables and placed beautiful fruit platters, vegetable salads, baked herb salmon, and unique cookies on the tables. Though my stomach was already overloaded, I still managed to have some salmon, fruits, vegetables, and cookies. I liked the moisture and soft texture of the cookies which were not too sweet. Before leaving, I was thinking about taking a few leftover cookies home; I did it and also learnt that the cookies, which cannot be purchased in bakeries, were the homemade creations of the youngest daughter of the director. I was very happy about it, being worthy of a good foodie, so my taste buds are sharp. Today’s lunch was filled with many delicious foods and I didn’t have any room in my stomach to try out the various cool drinks in the three large ice boxes.

Accell is a small company with about 20 people, mostly young, and most of their children are just a few years older than Ben, so Ben had the opportunity to closely watch older children playing soccer, riding on scooter, throwing sandbags, etc. He also got very close to two friendly dogs, as Ben likes dogs, but dogs usually didn’t like Ben and often barked at him. I heard that Ben also liked to drink Horchata too.

After eating and drinking happily, I casually chatted with people and noticed many dignified Asian beauties today, they looked very young, but already had many years of work experience. It’s true that people cannot be judged by their appearance. I like the two beauties, one was dressed in white from head to toe and another one was wearing goose yellow sweaters with light blue jeans. With the typical asian beauty figure which is the lack of sculptured facial and body features, I felt they were carrying a soft sense of fashion.

Because it was the first time for Meimei, my granddaughter, to meet her mother’s colleagues, my daughter received congratulations and gifts from colleagues one after another at the lunch party, which was an unexpected warm surprise. Before we went home, the director and his wife, Clara, used a wagon to bring all the gifts to Meimei and Ben, given by the company, to our car, as we couldn’t carry so many things across the park to the parking lot. Clara also said: “Sorry, we didn’t have time to give your daughter a baby shower. These gifts are to congratulate her on having a healthy baby.”

This is my first time visiting this big park, there is a big children’s playground on the left side of the parking lot and a lake in front of the parking lot, there are many concrete tables and benches, barbecue grills scattered on the lawn between the parking lot and the lake. I saw many volunteers picking up trash in the park and many large-scale picnic gatherings. After experiencing three years of the COVID pandemic, I was more thankful for the bustling scene of the park.

Little Episodes

09-23-2023, a company picnic.

（The view of our company lunch picnic under the shade of a few big trees.）

（Ben is playing soccer, while holding his gift of a stuffed animal playing soccer, eating, and watching the friendly dogs up close.)

（Lunch scene, Ben and the friendly dogs, a big balloon for Meimei: It’s A Girl, Clara showed Ben one of the gifts to him, a children book titled “I Am a Big Brother!”, which Ben liked to watch and listen.)

As a self-employed wanderer, I had not attended any employer organized party since my 2016 retirement.

When one of my friends said to me: “Our department will hold a party on Saturday. Do you want to go?” I replied :”Yes, I would like to go.” I immediately recalled the parties held by eBay and Paypal when I was in Silicon Valley: the company big parties, the quarterly all hands parties, the celebration of the successful launch of major products, the parties in the Great America Amusement Park in California for employees and families, etc, the parties with delicious food and fun activities.

Last night’s party was called “DACCPM Spring Fling ”, a party with drinks of red wine, white wine, beers and cocktails, also with delicious foods such as 72-hour stewed pork rib and beef rib. After drinking three glasses of white wine at the party, I felt under the influence and happy.

I thought there would be ocean views but saw no trace of water on the balcony. However, I had a close look at the beautiful handsome, senior scholars and loving partners dressed up with professional attitudes. I also noticed that many ladies in dresses had bare feet, not wearing pantyhose; that men were dressed up from head to toe that nobody wore sneakers nor jeans. Recalling my experience of such parties in Silicon Valley, wearing jeans or sneakers seemed semi-formal dressing code and wearing T-shirts with words and logos was accepted too. I was glad that I didn’t bring my casual dressing code of Silicon Valley here. In dressing, doing as the Romans do is also a manifestation of pious life. At the party, I was also brought to shake hands with the head of DACCPM, a young and tall middle-aged man.

I saw lots of beauties at the party and the most memorable one was the back of a straight black hair young lady who wore a long black floor-length dress and who had a pair of sneakers under her right arm. I felt her capable, confident, and beauty and took a photo of her back figure.

I also bumped into a born-in-90′s couple of exchange scholars from Peking Union Medical College Hospital. While chatting with them, I learnt the girl is from Chongqing and the boy is from Shandong; they were classmates in college and in graduate school; while she was at Chengdu West China Medical College for three years, he was at Beijing Union Medical College, so they were apart for three years in the past; now they came to MGH together for just over two months. I was really proud of their parents and couldn’t help taking a photo of them and told them: “Please send the photo to your parents, I am sure they will be very happy from it.”

Three or four days before the party, My daughter and I chatted about going to the party. As a software engineer who worked in Silicon Valley for almost 20 years, I thought it would be more natural to dress casually. However, my daughter encouraged me to spend some time preparing for the party. She said that the process of preparing for the party would also be joyful. In retrospect, really, the preparation process before the party has a lot of sweet memories.

When I told my daughter: “I was invited a department party, what should I wear?” She asked: “What do you like to wear?” I said: “a floral dress.” We went to the store together to pick up a dress and a pair of shoes. While lining up for checkout, I was lost as I forgot the checking out routine in a store. She reminded me to go to the counter with a flashing light and joked: “Poor mommy hasn’t bought any clothes for a very long time now.”

As I wanted to buy a small purse for my photo so I can take photos at the party, I asked my daughter before I went shopping: “What kind of purse should I buy for my phone?” She gave me a firm instruction: “Buy a pure black very simple purse.” I took her instruction seriously and looked at all the black purses in the store and bought a black purse with roses and a line of text. After coming back home, I explained my choice of this purse: “This purse has one of my favorite quotes: ‘Stop and smell the roses’. Although it is not pure black, it is a black purse.”. My daughter looked at the purse I handed over to her and praised it: “it’s very cute and chic, nice pick!” Hearing this made me very happy like a student being praised by the teacher.

My daughter also helped me to make my hair and choose accessories. One day, she asked me, “How do you comb your hair for the party?” I said, “Just wear two braids.” She disapproved: “It would be nicer to tie your hair up in a bun.” I said: “My hair is thick and strong, it would be hard to tie it up.” “We have the same hair. I used to bun up my hair when I attended Speech and Debate in high school. I’ll do it for you. Don’t worry.” She also lent me her pearl necklace and a very expensive black scarf with small flowers that she bought in Germany and said, “Wearing a pearl necklace looks good. You are always afraid of the cold. If the air conditioner is too cold, wearing this scarf will make you look good and keep you warm”. I have two rings, one is the emerald ring my mother gave me, and the other is the pearl ring my daughter gave me. The pearl on the ring was taken out of the shell by my daughter, so it is very special. My daughter suggested that I wear a pearl ring: “Green doesn’t match your outfit, and the pearl ring matches the pearl necklace, this way your outfit is clean in black and white.” Before stepping out of the house, I asked my daughter the last thing: “Should I use lipstick?” My daughter shook her head: “No. It would be too much for you.”

Little Episodes

1。 DACCPM
“The Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine (DACCPM) at Massachusetts General Hospital offers world-class patient care, the finest education for medical students and residents, innovative research laboratories and a team of accomplished faculty. Each year, we provide anesthesia services for more than 50,000 procedures in 67 operating rooms and 25 additional locations on the Mass General campus.

Our research activities are driven by an outstanding faculty of independent thinkers and cover a wide range of initiatives, including leading-edge investigations in critical care medicine, neurosciences, biomedical engineering, patient safety and simulation. Mass General conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of $1 billion.”

2. Photos of the party:
My little cute purse:

After drinking three glasses of white wine at the party, I felt under the influence and happy：

View from the balcony of DACCPM Spring Fling:

Photo combo on the party:

The back figure of the beauty with a pair of sneaker under her right arm：

Friday, my girlfriends, who were all once employees of eBay for many years, but were now employees of eBay, PayPal, Walmart or Visa, had a lunch gathering, a traditional Happy Friday routine for IT engineers in Silicon Valley.

I was late for today’s lunch gathering. As soon as I entered the restaurant, I saw four white-collar beauties with exquisite clothes and extraordinary temperament sitting leisurely and freely around the table near the window. Their presence added an unspeakable high-end atmosphere to the very small restaurant. I was secretly happy to be part of this group.

When these girlfriends got together, the talking around the table is usually more interesting than the food on the table. Watching TV shows, traveling abroad, raising children, making new friends, and caring about older parents were common topics that formed a relaxing atmosphere and let us be close to each other.

“The TV show which the British Princess was playing a role in was really very interesting.” Pei, who liked watching the show, recommended it to us.

“Running can make you ‘High’.” Su, who just finished the half marathon, shared the happiness brought by running.

“There seems to be a lot of people applying for college next year,” sighed Liping, the mother of a Millennium (a child born in 2000).

The news that one of us became a mother-in-law this summer suddenly excited all of us. After a burst of congratulations and inquiries, we praised her and blessed her newly wedded son and daughter-in-law! The wedding candy brought by the newly mother-in-law made our dining table unusually festive and filled with joyful spirits.

We talked about our children, ranging from newly married adults to elementary school pupil. We, five mothers, have eight children in total. Our children covered a wide life stages: newlyweds, newly employed, graduate students, college students, college applicants, elementary school pupil. During our conversation, I noticed some industry characteristics: six of the eight children are boys and only two children are girls. The gender proportion is seriously unbalanced. Then I thought about children’s gender among my familiar female colleagues, I realized that majority of us have sons instead of daughters.

After Friday’s lunch, while walking with my friend during the weekend, I mentioned my discovery of the gender imbalance of children of mothers I knew in IT industry. After listening to my discovery, my friend joked, “The IT industry is too tough, women working in IT field need to be more manly, so the probability of giving birth to boys is naturally higher.” I thought my friend’s explanation was incisive, which fully reflected the precision and humor of her technology major in college.

Thinking about “women working in IT field need to be more manly” and recalling my IT girlfriends I saw on Friday, I felt my friends were light, elegant and high-end, exuding a strong feminine flavor without a trace of manliness. Perhaps the long-standing charm of the intellectual feminine has already vaporized the manly spirit from their soul, a kind of cognizant and beauty brought about by experience.

“Information technology (IT) is the use of any computers, storage, networking and other physical devices, infrastructure and processes to create, process, store, secure and exchange all forms of electronic data.”

07-01-2016, Friday

On Friday July 1, 2016, my daughter and I went to Half Moon Bay Beach State Park for sightseeing. Because it was a weekday, both the winding mountain road and the parking lots in the park were empty. It was a cloudy day on the Half Moon Bay beach, but there were lots of ocean waves and flocks of seabirds. I felt it was filled with life.

On the soft sandy beach, I took off my shoes and carried them in one hand. I walked barefoot on the soft sandy beach slowly step by step and bowed my head looking at the sand. I listened to the undulating waves that were washing my heart, breathed the salty sea breeze that was clearing my lungs, and collected my favorite beachside objects, like tree branches and roots that had been soaked in seawater for long time, burnt wood coal left by campfire, and beautiful seabird feathers. When I returned to the parking lot with a hand full of stuff, my daughter joked, “Don’t take your treasures home, we already have too many at home.” I said, “Well, let me keep a picture of them.”

Sitting in the open picnic area beside the parking lot of the beach park, I put a pile of lifeless wood blocks full of the vicissitudes of the years on the picnic table that was filled with bird droppings, and put my old leather sandals, which had began to walk with me since 2004, next to them.

Looking at this strange pattern combination, I thought of feet and dreams.
(1)
Foot is a boat
Under storm, unyielding and tough
Reliable, forceful

Dream is the sail
Ride on the wind, very brave
Keeping original intention alive

(2)
Barefoot
Walking along the beach
Collecting lifeless
Tree roots, rotten wood, dead branches and
Feathers that once flew in the sky

Dream
Scanning the long journey of life
Awaking life
Feelings, wishes, thoughts and
The footprints that once touched countless places

Never forget the original intention
Countless places cross over from the beginning and
My dreams
flying freely above the sea into the sky

Maggie,a current eBay employee works at the San Jose headquarters, shared a road sign of eBay’s San Jose headquarters on Hamilton with us in our eBay and PayPal’s colleagues group a few days ago. I didn’t expect this picture would attracted such an exclamation from some colleagues. My memories of my previous workplaces are often vivid with big or small stories. Looking at the Motors and Music office buildings opposite of each other in the photo, I remembered a story that began with the name Petra.

Around 2002, there was a beautiful woman named Petra in both of eBay’s product department and development department. One Petra was black-haired petite beauty and the other Petra was brown-haired tall slim beauty. They were both British. Dark-haired Petra was the product manager of eBay’s category in SYI (Sell Your Item) system and she had a strong British accent. Brown-haired Petra was the technical manager of the international development group and she seemed to have no British accent（I just learnt from my eBay colleague Yana that brown-haired Petra is a Austrian).

I remember when my good friend Yang changed the eBay category user interface pages of SYI flow, her product manager was the dark-haired Petra. This project had completed before SYI was converted to Java language.

I am more familiar with the brown-haired Petra. I still remember the first time I met her after I delivered the cross merchanting function on eBay’s US site.

The new software products of eBay were always pushed to the US site first, and then to the international sites in two weeks, because it took extra time to translate the English on the user interface pages into other languages. The user interface pages of individual countries sometimes needed special treatment. For example, German is often much longer than English. The well design pages in English become ugly in German. Because of this, the webpages of eBay German site sometimes needed to be altered a bit.

The software developers in charge of eBay’s US site, which is the core business logics of eBay, were in the Motors building of Hamilton headquarters in San Jose, and the software developers in charge of eBay’s international sites were in the Music (or Sports) building across the street from Motors building.

After the cross merchanting function was successfully promoted to the US site, I heard that the company would soon promote this function to several other major international sites of eBay, including German and UK. One day, a brown-haired tall beautiful woman came to my desk and introduced herself as Petra, who was in charge of the international development team (it seemed that she was not a manager at that time). Her team had spent more than two weeks developing and testing the cross merchanting function, but found that the new function still could not be fully realized on eBay’s UK site, so she came and asked me for help.

Because the default core process of eBay software system was based on US site and each country’s site had some unique if-else logics to branch out to deal with the country’s special business logic, I understood the possibility that the cross merchanting function might not have been fully realized on the UK site. After I asked Petra about the details of the test, I told her: “The main business logic of the cross merchanting logic I implemented was to communicate with the subsequent system through the database. If the cross merchanting function has failed sometimes, it seems related to the writing to or the reading from the database, because the user entered data are directly transmitted to the system.” Later, the cross merchanting function was successfully pushed to Germany, UK etc. sites. I started to know Petra now.

At that time, I received a lot of emails daily in the office as I was belong to many distribution email lists. Because I was always very busy on coding all day and I also needed to stay on top of issues related to my projects might be brought up by emails, if the email senders were unknown to me or the titles of email were not related to my familiar projects, I usually deleted them immediately without opening. One afternoon, I saw brown-haired Petra had sent out an email with the title “eBay is like a shrine”. Because I had attended the Catholic University of American and I knew the church in our school is a national shrine, I wondered how eBay could become a shrine, so I immediately opened the email Petra just sent out. When I saw the content, I could not stop myself from laughing out loudly. Petra’s email showed a screenshot: a flattened twisted small stainless spoon found near the eBay office building was auctioned on eBay US site for more than $4. When eBay was at its very prosperous stage, my life was something liked a fantasy at times.

Little Episodes

1. 2021-11, a photo of a road sign at eBay’s San Jose headquarters, Motors and Music office buildings opposite of each other in the photo. ( taken by Maggie)

2. National Shrine and CUA
“The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is a large Catholic minor basilica and national shrine located in Washington, D.C., United States, on 400 Michigan Ave NE, Washington, DC 20017, adjacent to the Catholic University of America. Wikipedia”

Today is Friday and the crowded Paypal parking lot on the North First Street in San Jose was very empty. Friday is often called Happy Friday and my colleagues usually get together to go out for lunch on Fridays to relax and catch up. As I was very busy with a POC, proof of concept, project for a few weeks now, I did not go out for lunch but had my lunch alone in the garden near the pond, in order to relax myself and to think through the challenges I was facing for the POC project. POC “is a realization of a certain method or idea in order to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle with the aim of verifying that some concept or theory has practical potential. A proof of concept is usually small and may or may not be complete.”

This POC project intended to add a new way of acceptance and treatment to an existing large software system. This task was similar to a worker digging into the ground using an excavator and trying to figure out how to insert a new pipeline under an existing sewer system. The excavator, new pipelines, and various input valves of the POC project were invisible but real and smelly. I had to learn the existing system well in order to excavate smoothly without damaging the old pipeline system and to limit any potential errors.

While trying to connect the new input valves to the old pipelines, I encountered many mismatches between them. Resolving the mismatch was a challenge: should I modify the old existing system to fit the new input data format or adjust the new input data format to fit the old ones? Unexpected problems had appeared during the earlier research phase of the POC, just like layers of an onion, the problems showed up layer by layer, seemingly endless. I used my previous working experience to come up with solutions while facing new problems. The early phase of POC is a gradual process, often a big step forward and a small step backward. As I was sorting out unknown and unexpected things bit by bit, the POC project was a cumbersome task that took lots of time without really any progress to report.

Once the old system was hooked with new pipelines and valves, I needed to stimulate inputs to test the upgraded software system by triggering as many if-else pathways inside the system as possible. Modifying the software system was still different from modifying an underground sewer pipeline.

Today is a software engineer’s original workday.

Little Episodes

1. 2016-06-10, Happy Friday. I and my colleagues went out to have a lunch today. We, including born in the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s and 1960s, covered the major spectrum of ages in our workplace. While eating the delicious food, pretty girl, handsome boys and me talked and laughed. Happy Friday！

2. 2021-11-16, under the protection of the police, workers were digging a hole on the road.

Today, while chatting with Vicki, she showed me her harvest of big colorful tomatoes and her multitude of eggplants hanging on one plant. I asked how did she become such a skillful farmer. Turns out, she had a high IQ worker who took care of the crops for her, and she just enjoyed picking the fruits and vegetables. Indeed, she is a farmer who sits back to enjoy the harvests of others’ labor. But that wasn’t always the case, thinking back to the time when we were farmers in the software coding fields, she could not sit back but instead had to roll her sleeves.

I recalled the first project I worked on with Vicki in eBay’s software coding fields: Introducing 5th-Level leaf category to eBay’s existing 4th-level leaf category tree (“5th Category” in short).

The eBay categories sort and group eBay’s tremendous goods from many casual and professional sellers into different relevant clusters. The eBay categories to eBay goods is a bit like the skeleton to the human body, as the eBay categories are the internal navigation channels for storing and retrieving eBay goods in a quick way.

eBay category is a critical aspect of selling goods on eBay and eBay’s business, because eBay organizes selling goods into different categories intend to help buyers to find things to buy easily. Therefore, eBay sellers want to pick the right category to sell theirs goods quickly. Also from a business standpoint, eBay wants to analyze the eBay transactions in clusters to forecast selling trends accurately in different categories.

Jim, my boss, was the technical development manager of this project, Meredith was the product manager, Vicki was the software development leader (and the real product manager), and Jeff and I were the main developers for this project. It was a huge development project.

The Critical Role of eBay Category

Much of eBay’s internal business logic was configured based on eBay’s category structure. In 2001, eBay’s US official website had more than ten top categories, including real estate categories (ID verification required, third-party escrow provided), motors categories (many models, third-party escrow provided, it is a different web site from eBay US), and antique collections, etc. There can also be four levels of subcategories under each top category.

The major revenue of the eBay website comes from the listing fee. eBay sellers pay for storing each good on the eBay system. Different types of category may have different listing fees, for example, the listing fee for each car in the motors category is 100 US dollars.

eBay also has a hidden category for adults called “Everything Else”. Adult users had to log in to search for this category. Back then, we jokingly called this category “eBay’s Dark Side.” Looking back today, I think the low-key approach to the adult category at that time was one of eBay’s thoughtful approach, which showed that eBay was aiming to become a respectable high-tech company.

Many technical designs of eBay’s online goods were also closely related to eBay category structure. For instance, the core technology to distribute eBay goods into different databases, instead of a single one database, was based on eBay’s category structure. I remember that there were 11 databases for storing information of eBay’s online goods, including from category host 1 to category host 9 and 1 default category host (CatHost0-CatHost9, 1 DefaultCatHost). This design was completed before 2000. Vicki once explained to me: “This design made it impossible for 11 database hosts to collapse at the same time, so there are always some database hosts that can support the buyers to browse eBay goods online and allow the sellers to list new goods in some categories. Therefore, eBay’s website will not be completely paralyzed due to database problems.” In 2012, the second year after I worked at Paypal, Paypal started to consider storing user data in multiple distributed database hosts to prevent the entire system from becoming paralyzed, which just goes to show that eBay’s database design was more than ten years ahead of Paypal’s database design.

A very special project

Jim, sitting next to me, mentioned the importance of introducing the 5th level leaf category into eBay category a few times before it became a real project. According to Jim, 5th level leaf category was needed by the collectible top category only, other top categories did not care this feature at all. Extending to a 5th level leaf category in eBay category tree would affect almost the entire eBay system and management was afraid that such a change might cause unseeing problems to the already very complicated eBay system. So it was difficult to find a suitable product manager to start this project.

I went to the first floor with Jim to meet Meredith, the potential product manager of the “5th Category” project. She dressed very casually and spoke very friendlily. From the conversation I learnt that Meredith was the owner of eBay US collectible category, and she had several assistants. She and her assistants were responsible for adding and changing categories under the collectible top category according to the needs of sellers and of eBay’s internal business, in order to ease the search and sale of collectible goods on eBay’s website and to facilitate business analysis of after-sales data. She was not really a product manager, so I was curious how Meredith would compose the product requirements for this project.

Later, Meredith really became the product manager for the “5th Category” project. At the first project discussion meeting of “5th Category”, Meredith said: “eBay US has more than 10 top categories and the owner of each top category is just like me, they only care about how to easily and smoothly add the 5th level leaf category to the existing 4th level leaf category from the perspective of the administrator. Regarding the specific design requirements and technical implementations that may be involved in adding the 5th level leaf category to eBay category, I am willing to follow the suggestions of developers.”

I heard that this was a very technical project, and Vicki was the real product manager.

Vicki, the Product Manager

“Introducing 5th-Level leaf category to eBay’s 4th-level category tree” was similar to widening the water pipes of all the rooms in a building, the implementation details were cumbersome, and the construction designer must be familiar with the internal structure of the building. So Vicki seemed to be the right candidate.

“5th category” project required all front end pages and behind the scenes business logic that refer to eBay categories to be upgraded and updated, including eBay’s search domain and list domain, two completely independent services. The development managers of those two services discussed with Vicki about their concerns on technical design and their hopes that the design could optimize the implementation.

Vicki told the two managers: “We will modify the core data structure of eBay category to handle 5th-level. If your applications could dynamically handle the eBay category structure in your domain, then your back-end changes might not be big, but the user facing pages probably needed more changes, as the UI real estate would be expanding.”

Those two managers, middle-aged, were very satisfied with Vicki’s answer.

Jeff and I were both newbies who had just joined eBay and did not have a full picture of the eBay categories. According to Vicki’s design , we changed the intricate software code related to the eBay categories in eBay’s core software system. Jeff and I were both serious and hardworking people, but a few hours after this product was launched on the eBay website, we were notified: “’5th Category’ project brought system memory leaks.” Memory Leaks are recognized by C++ language software developers as a fatal point, because memory leaks may cause the system to crash.

Vicki quickly found Josh, a geek for the production website, who went to live debug to triage this memory leaking. Josh quickly found the line of code that caused the system memory leak and shared the details on the “Netscape Instant Message”. Jeff and I worked together overnight to modify the code that caused the memory leak. That was the first time I saw Josh. I thought Josh, who was short with a long beard and dressed very casually, seemed to be deliberately pretending to be an old guy, which qualified him as the “old naughty boy” in Jin Yong’s novels in my memory.

“5th Category” was a very large development project, which only introduced a single memory leak, so this was a very successful project. Meredith, the theoretical product manager, specially organized a celebration party for the developers and gave each person a customized clock.

Snippets of eBay Culture

1. In 2001, eBay seemed like to gift clocks or watches to employees.

In 2001, Lynn, the product development VP, gave us a watch with an eBay logo as a new year gift. I remembered the watch has two styles: men and women, it was very pretty. After I got the watch, I joked with my colleagues: “We were in a rush to deliver products every day. Now Lynn gave everyone a watch to further enhance our sense of being in a timely manner.”

This is the fifth anniversary souvenir eBay gave to the employees. Photoed by Vicki: another clock

2. eBay 5th level category structure and eBay management structure

In 2001, eBay’s management structure was CEO – VP – Manager – developer, a total of four levels. One day we talked about the “Extending eBay category structure to the 5th level”. Sonya joked: “The company’s management structure is only four levels, but the eBay category needs 5th level. It seemed that eBay goods were more complex than people!”

Therefore, the 5th category had another meaning among developers who were familiar with the eBay category. A few years later, while the number of developers increased sharply, the company’s management structure also expanded quickly. A senior developer once commented: “In terms of personnel structure, we were already under the 5th category, and people are really more complex than eBay goods.”

Little Episodes

1. The happy growing eggplant and the harvested large tomato shared by Vicki, the laid back farmer:

2. Vicki’s tomatoes had been dry in the middle. She thought it was caused by the insects initially. Later, her friend, an expert, told her it was calcium deficiency and needed to add calcium fertilizer. Vicki smashed her calcium tablets to mix with water and feed her tomato plants. After this, her tomato grew big and full as shown above.

3. 2021-08-20, eBay category structure on search front page:

Antiques have 5th-Level leaf category

eBay’s adult category：

Today, while talking to my nephew, a born-the-90s, about well-known software products in Europe, he said: “Skype was developed by Europeans, but it was acquired by Microsoft.”

This opened my memory: before Microsoft acquired Skype, eBay acquired Skype in 2005, when eBay was not very big and the employees seemed to have a say in the company’s decisions.

In 2005, eBay purchased Skype’s products for $2.6 billion, but did not acquire Skype’s core technology. Skype’s core technology is still a patent owned by Skype’s founders.

Shortly after the acquisition of Skype, eBay renovated an independent two-story house on the side of Hamilton, where eBay’s headquarters is located. While walking in the campus during lunch time, I often wondered who will come to stay in this very special office. Later, I heard it became the office of the Skype devision. This story give a glimpse of the privileges enjoyed by Skype employees at that time and eBay’s high expectations for the Skype devision.

After eBay acquired Skype, the combination of the eBay market, the PayPal payment system and the Skype communication network provided new business opportunities for eBay; In order to organically integrate the three parts, eBay added a New Trinity (three in one) unit under a new VP.

However, the response of eBay’s acquisition of Skype among eBay employees was not good. I remember that at several employee conferences in 2006, someone questioned John D. our CEO like: “Skype is almost unprofitable. Why did the company spend such big money on acquisition?”, “How did the company conduct the pre-acquisition evaluation?”, etc. These questions also made me feel that the acquisition of Skype was a bad investment. Skype was acquired by Microsoft from eBay for $8.5 billion in 2011, which seemed eBay’s acquisition of Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005 a worthwhile investment.

The Trinity unit died prematurely, Skype was acquired by Microsoft in 2011, and Paypal separated from eBay into an independent company in 2015. The VP of Trinity founded a payment company in 2011. I heard his company was successfully acquired by Walmart.

The former structure of combining the eBay market, the PayPal payment system, and the Skype communication network is just like a drop of rain in the four seasons of a rapidly expanding large company’s history. But in the hearts of their employees who had personally experienced this drizzle, it always held some personal emotional, interesting and knowledgeable stories.

I told my nephew with a laugh: “in 2006, I was convinced that eBay’s acquisition of Skype was an unwise investment, and I was very upset about it.”

My nephew replied: “eBay’s acquisition of Skype was a long-term investment.”

I sighed: “Yes, it’s hard for conscientious bottom employees to have a vision of long-term investment. My resentment was just an unwarranted worry. ”

After listening to the stories of eBay and Skype, my daughter commented: “I still remember when we were in junior high school, there was a dispute between our classmates to support Google video or YouTube. Later, Google Video fell out of favor among users, and Google bought YouTube. ”

A drizzle in the history of rapidly expanding large companies always left some personal emotional, interesting and knowledgeable stories in the hearts of people who had experienced this drizzle in person.

Snap of History

User facing Youtube grew much faster than backend Skype did.

In 2003， Skype was founded by Niklas Zennström, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark.
On 09-12-2005, eBay Inc. agreed to acquire Skype Technologies SA for approximately $2.5 billion。
On 05-10－2011, Microsoft Corporation acquired Skype for $8.5 billion.

In 02-2005 YouTube was launched by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim.
In 10-2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion.

Recently, my brother and I often chatted about e-commerce opportunities. I commented that the concept of some e-commerce products I developed more than 10 years ago in eBay is still little known to the world.

For example, in 2002, I felt the management of product development in eBay changed a lot. The new products that I worked on were no longer given by Jim, my boss, to his team members. Instead, I started to develop new products via inter-team cooperation. I worked with mostly young men, such as “Cross Merchandising”. I was the development leader, and worked with Darren, from the user interface team, and Andrey from the customer service team.

At that time, the product managers for most of the large products of eBay were Harvard graduates. I remembered Ha, the product manager of eBay Storefront launched in 2001, who was a Vietnamese girl who had graduated from Harvard.

The product manager of Cross Merchandising is Ben F. When introducing himself at the first product meeting, Ben said, “I’m not from Harvard. I’m a neighbor of Harvard.”

I had no idea of Boston and didn’t understand the joke, so I seriously asked, “Where are you from?”

Ben probably didn’t expect to meet such an ignorant and inquisitive person. He looked at me in surprise and said, “Most of eBay’s big product managers are from Harvard, but I’m not. I’m from MIT.” He stopped and laughed, “So ‘Cross Merchandising’ will be a very technical product.”

“Cross Merchandising” attempted to recommend 3 to 5 relevant goods associated a order to the buyer on the order confirm page, so as to automatically and intelligently help the merchant to sell more goods.

“Cross Merchandising” was a highly technically-oriented product. After several discussions, we found that the current situation of eBay’s database could not support Ben’s functional requirements for the new product. The company allocated special funds to expand our data storage capacity for “Cross Merchandising”. Hubert, one of the database architect of eBay at that time, who later worked as CTO on dangdang.com, designed and introduced the “IO cache (write fast and read fast)“ into eBay’s huge seller database.

This product was originally planned as a new feature for the eBay buyer system. After introducing “write fast and read fast” into eBay’s huge seller database, I had to update the SYI system to adopt the “write fast” approach, resulting in a new and unplanned workload. This product took several months to complete. Because the project dragged on for a long time, David S, the then development director, came to ask me, “Are you sure it’s safe to launch this product at the end of the year?”

I said confidently, “The biggest change for this product is how to interact with the new database. Andrey is responsible for testing all the conditions of the database interface, and I think he did well. If the database interface is safe then the product will be fine.”

At the end of 2002, we successfully launched the new product of “Cross Merchandising” to the eBay site.

In January 2003, Ben, the product manager, sent a thank-you email to the whole product team, saying that the data analysis showed that this new product was very popular with eBay sellers, and thanked everyone for their efforts to successfully fulfill this new product concept with its high technology requirement. The day I received the email happened to be my birthday. I was so pleased and stayed happy with myself for such a long time, so I remembered this product deeply.

Little Episodes

1. 08-12-2021, Although today’s amazon.com applies the Cross Merchandising concept so well, searching the Internet for “Cross Merchandising” shows that the references were dated to 2015, 12 years later than the “Cross Merchandising” e-commerce function we developed on eBay in 2002. At the forefront of technology application to real business, it seems still a long way from practice to theory into textbooks, which may be one of the reasons why the company always wants to recruit people with work experience.

2. The distance between Harvard and MIT is about 2 miles.

3. My two partners in this product
Darren and I went to Kijiji later, and he became my boss in Kijiji. Darren nicknamed himself “square head” because his head is a little square.

Andrey volunteered to work in a branch in Europe for a year when he was on eBay. In 2009, he went to a company that developed medical and health management system. He also asked me if I wanted to join his company, because the development of health management systems were very popular in 2009.

4. 2006, Kijiji technology division (from 2006 Kijiji Calendar)

In 2006, I transferred from eBay’s global website development team to eBay’s Kijiji regional website development team.

In the newly established Kijiji Development division, I was the only developer who was most familiar with the functions of eBay’s e-commerce. Therefore, I sometimes chatted with the technical or product manager about the e-commerce products I developed on eBay because they were very interested. Once, I talked to a technical manager about the “Cross Merchandising” I developed in 2002. The manager couldn’t understand the operating principle and technical implementation of the product. At that time, I realized that in the rapid growth of eBay from 2001 to 2003, my boss constantly gave me opportunities to develop brand new e-commerce products, which may be related to my unconventional and careful way of thinking, because when I received the “Cross Merchandising”, I didn’t think this new product was incomprehensible, although it really was a product with novel ideas.