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.”

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, I went to the hospital for a bone density test. While lying down as instructed, I asked the doctor: “Measuring bone density is still very new to me. How do you do the measurement?”

The doctor said: “The bone mineral density is measured by X-rays in very weak intensity similar to the intensity of the security inspection at the airport. It is also safe for pregnant women.”

I joked, “I don’t have such concerns anymore. I am at a new stage with new concerns now.”

My new stage refers to menopause. My new concerns are hot flashes and fluctuating emotions. I have experienced hot flashes for more than a year now. I experienced suddenly sweating in the middle of the night, where sometimes the sweat could soak my pajamas and bedsheets. I also felt suddenly happy or angry, inexplicable and uncontrollable. I silently experienced the changes of estrogen being unscrupulous to me, ignoring my rich life experience of more than 50 years. I could not help but think of my rebellious youth. Because I realized that the change of youth hormones may be more shocking to the young heart without much life experience than the change of estrogen with me.

When I first experienced hot flashes, I asked around about hot flashes.

In California, I chatted with Karen, one of my best friends, about hot flashes, as Karen also experienced it. Karen said: “The most embarrassing hot flashes are sudden sweating in public places. One time, I experienced this on the air plane.”

In Massachusetts, I consulted Ping, my college roommate, and her mother about hot flashes. Neither of them had experienced hot flashes. The same was true for many of my high school classmates.

It seems that hot flashes have genetic factors. Unfortunately, my mother had already passed away. So I could not know if my mother had also experienced hot flashes.

My daughter also asked her classmates to check with her mother who is in her sixties. She too did not experience any hot flashes.

I called my friends and colleagues in California to talk about hot flashes. I learned that hot flashes vary from person to person, and some will last more than ten years. That is scary! I just hope I don’t have to go through so many hot flashes.

In September 2020, Yang, who studied and practiced in the traditional Chinese medicine suggested: “Drink Ophiopogon japonicus and Schisandra chinensis soup and stop drinking alcohol.” to relieve hot flashes. I bought Ophiopogon japonicus, Schisandra chinensis, and a casserole specially made for soup. I made the soup several times and felt that the soup did reduce the symptoms of hot flashes.

A few days ago, by accident, I chatted with an 80 year old retired professor about hot flashes, and she said that her hot flashes had lasted for more than ten years. She said: “I had hot flashes during menopause and I could not sleep well at night. At that time, I was still teaching. In order to have the energy to prepare for class, I took some medicine I probably shouldn’t have taken. ”

I said, “I didn’t take prescription medicine, but I’ve been eating two eggs a day for more than a year.”

The professor asked curiously, “Who said eating eggs is useful for hot flashes?”

I laughed “My own guess. We generally lack estrogen during menopause. Eggs can improve the productivity of estrogen in our body. ”

The retired professor said: “I heard that the most difficult thing is a mother in menopause dealing with a rebellious child in adolescence.”

Note: In 2021-09, after lasting for more than two years, my hot flashes symptom is almost gone now.

Little Episodes

1, Today, I felt like entering the mysterious hall when I entered the hospital. As soon as I entered the door, I changed my mask and washed my hands.

There are many sentries in the hospital. Each sentry asks the same question: “Did you have a fever or cough? Are you COVID-19 positive? Have you been exposed to COVID-19 positive people? Have you been out of town in the past 14 days?” I answered the same questions twice before I got the green pass. I answered the same questions three or four times before I went into the doctor’s office.

2. In September 2020, my friend Yang gave me a prescription for relieving hot flashes after looking at my tongue remotely: “Don’t drink alcohol, drink Ophiopogon japonicus (10g) Schisandra chinensis (5g) soup twice a day, one time in the daytime, another in the evening..”

3. Ophiopogon japonicus

Ophiopogon japonicus can improve the immune system of the human body. It also has the effects of nourishing Yin, strengthen lung, relieving cough and reducing blood sugar.

4. Schisandra chinensis

Schisandra chinensis can nourish liver, promote the secretion of saliva or body fluid, and decrease perspiration.

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.

In 2001, my boss Jim gave me many opportunities to work side-by-side with Vicki who was familiar with the whole eBay system at that time, in order to understand the essential of the already big and complicated eBay software system. At that time, Vicki was mainly responsible for eBay’s SYI system (SellYourItems, commonly known as the selling system on eBay website), so that year I mostly worked on developing SYI functions.

In the spring of 2001, Jim assigned me to work with Vicki to develop eBay’s first payment system upgrade: providing eBay sellers the choice of using Billpoint, eBay’s internal payment system, while uploading their items to the eBay website, so that buyers can select Billpoint for payment during their checkout. This project will change both the front-end user interface page and the back-end data processing logic, to make the Billpoint payment option as a permanent dominant attribute for eBay users, similar to a person’s height.

This was a big project scheduled to be delivered in about five weeks. After Vicki and I worked together on this project for two weeks, the project was suddenly called off.

When Jim told us the news, he tried to comfort us by saying: “Cancelling a project like this, having been developed by two developers for already two weeks, isn’t a development problem. ”

After the project was canceled, Vicki and I went to a meeting for the project with many other people. I was surprised to see that a lawyer on eBay was leading the meeting, because in my previous experience, the project managers were always leading these meetings.

The lawyer first explained to us the essence of our project: “This project tries to help eBay sellers put their wallets in the Billpoint system.”

I immediately felt that the lawyer summarized our project accurately and concisely. Because this project will add a “permanent attribute of Billpoint payment option” to eBay users at the back-end inside eBay system, but the specific payment information will be completed by sellers at the Billpoint side and the payment information will stored in the Billpoint system instead of the eBay system.

The lawyer then said, “This project is similar to putting your wallet in someone else’s purse. It’s very unsafe and unwise. So we cancelled it. ”

This experience made me aware that ideology is more important than technology!

Six months later, in the fall of 2001, as the tech leader, I designed and worked with a team of developers to develop the first generation of eBay Checkout, to allow buyers to choose Billpoint as the payment while placing their orders on the eBay website. This is a new process outside of the SYI system, and it is also the first time for the eBay system to record and store the buyers’ checkout processes.

I still remembered that during our routine project discussion sessions, Jeff, the product manager of eBay checkout, a very calm short gentleman, always reminded us with enthusiasm: “The purpose of introducing checkout is to squeeze PayPal out with Billpoint. So we need to think about how to make Billpoint stick together with the checkout process.”

A few days after the eBay Checkout was pushed out to the eBay websit, Lilian, the project manager, suddenly asked me, “Our business analyst found out that too little checkout data were recorded in the database. What do you think the problem could be?”

I immediately replied confidently, “Developers and testers had repeatedly tested all flows of this large new project before it went live. It is impossible to miss any buyer checkout process!”

Then I thought about it a bit and said, “The data of checkout process will be decentralized and stored on eleven different database machines, just like the data of eBay users and eBay items are decentralized in eleven different database machines. If a business analyst only goes to one database machine to extract checkout data, he will only get one tenth of the data. Of course, it will be too little. ”

Later, Lilian told me: “You are right. Now, the business analysts see a large amount of buyer checkout data from eleven database machines.”

The recorded data of the checkout process shows that very few buyers used Billpoint as the payment option during their checkout. Further analysis shows that many eBay sellers provided a link to PayPal on the item description section, a free text format for the sellers to enter anything without restrictions. So the buyer still had the opportunity to choose PayPal as the checkout payment even though the Billpoint payment option is stickied during the eBay checkout process.

Subsequently, the SYI system specially added a new function, strip JS (strip Javascript), to remove Javascript from item description to prevent sellers from providing PayPal links or buttons in the item description section on eBay website. I remembered one Friday evening, I was called to analyze a serious website issue that “the function of SYI strip JS in item description” failed recently. This request came from Jeremy K, a young leader in our Development Department of eBay at that time. I took this request to another office building to get Justin E, a master of Javascript (web dynamic language) at that time, to analyze the problem together. We both agreed that the changes in recent weeks will not cause “strip JS function to failure”, so the function failure could not have been caused by eBay developers.

Later, I heard that PayPal’s Javascript developers are better than eBay’s at that time. Therefore PayPal always managed to dynamically add its links or buttons to eBay’s item description section (There were as many security vulnerabilities as competitive opportunities in the early days of the online market), so eBay buyers could still choose to pay with PayPal during checkout.

Less than a year after the launch of the first generation of eBay’s Checkout, eBay bought PayPal on October 3, 2002. I felt very sad that our much worked-on product of eBay Checkout was a failure.

A few years later, when I told a product manager that I was the tech leader of eBay’s first generation of Checkout, I was told: “The contribution of Checkout function is collecting big data to help eBay executives make a major decision to give up Billpoint and buy PayPal.”

Big data thus plays a critical role in corporate decision-making.

eBay’s decentralized database in 2001:

A core technical usage of eBay’s item category is providing a decentralization standard for SYI to store eBay items (sellers’ goods) in different databases, based on which category the items belong to. I remembered that there were eleven decentralized databases for eBay items, namely catHost0 to catHost9 plus default catHost.

As eleven database machines cannot be down at the same time, eBay’s website will never be paralyzed due to a database crash. There is always some database out of the eleven still serving traffic, so eBay buyers can view and buy some items and eBay sellers can upload some new items, etc.

Yang, one of my close friends and longtime coworkers at eBay and Paypal, once asked me: “You are always very quiet and shy, but seemed very confident when discussing site issues. Why?” I then briefly told her this story which I am sharing now, a memoir to celebrate Alisa and Ronnie’s 50th anniversary. 

In the early 1990s, I was very stressed while preparing my PhD oral defense at CUA (The Catholic University of America). One day, while walking with Prof. Arron “Ronnie” Barkatt, my PhD advisor, from Maloney Hall to Hannan Hall, I expressed doubt regarding my research abilities to him. After hearing my thoughts, Ronnie stopped walking, thought for a moment, looked at me directly, and said: “Jing, if you are smart and if you have spent a lot more time on a subject than others, you have to believe that you are one of the experts on the subject.”

Ronnie’s advice not only helped me in my academic studies, as a PhD candidate, but also guided me in my IT career, as a software engineer in a fast-growing internet company.

In 2001, during my first year in eBay, I worked on a few very important products, such as the eBay Store, the eBay category tree upgrade, the PicturePack Bundle (PPB), and the eBay First Generation Checkout because I was in the core team that focused on developing eBay’s core products.

PPB would enable one sale item to have more images for a big fee (around $2.67). The images would not be stored by eBay, but by a third party, with whom eBay had signed a business contract on how to share the PPB profits. Both parties expected the PPB to be very profitable, as many new sellers started to sell on eBay in 2001.

And so I worked on the PPB feature, scheduled to launch in four weeks.

In 2001, eBay’s website system was developed in four languages with completely different syntax and grammar. To add a new feature to the eBay website, developers had to create and/or modify all four languages in different files. The job of developing the PPB feature was similar to a construction job of making a hole in a wall and installing a new receiving window that needs to be decorated and also to be connected to a newly-installed conveyor belt to reach the existing external inventory storage area.

To launch the PPB new feature onto eBay’s live website, I needed to merge the files that had my changes to the launch track. Commonly, files that were modified by multiple projects in different places by different developers often had overlapped changes, merging those files may accidentally lose new changes due to the overlapping, which will cause partial failure of new functions on eBay’s website.

PPB was a tough and time constraint task for a newcomer. I often worked overtime in order to launch the PPB on time.

After working on a new product for a few days, Jim, my boss, kept on blinking his eyes and said to me in a very unhappy tone: “After launching the PPB feature, the third party noticed a sharp increase of space usage from eBay, but our business analyst did not see the new money at all. QA said all functions of the PPB passed the QA test. It looks like you lost part of the PPB functions during your merge! ”

In eBay’s development division we have a well-known joke: “US law says ‘you are innocent, until proven guilty.’ But the unspoken rule in eBay’s development division is ‘You are guilty until you can prove you are innocent.’”

From Jim’s tone and expression, I knew that he was under very big pressure, so my pressure increased sharply and I felt flustered immediately. Then I suddenly remembered Ronnie’s advice in the 1990s, and I soon calmed down to seriously investigate the problem of no money coming in from PPB feature; because I spent more time on PPB than QA, and I thought I should have more say than QA. Finally, I reached out to Le, an expert on eBay’s batch jobs. She told me that the PPB needs to piggyback a batch job to inform the billing system to collect the new money from PPB. eBay’s website system and eBay’s batch jobs system were in two different worlds, communications between them was almost impossible to be traced in files, but only by human working knowledge, therefore piggybacking batch job was missing in the engineer design document initially.

So I told Jim: “The QA didn’t actually test all functions, as we didn’t know a batch job also needed to be tested.”

Jim said: “She is a respected QA, I was surprised to hear this.”

I started to learn that people sometimes quickly pass the blame to protect themselves under stressful situations. It also taught me to work more diligently to find the real problem instead of blaming others, in remembering my advisor’s advice.

Little Episodes

1. My advisor Ronnie and I on the day of my master graduation ceremony:

2. After my Ph.D. oral defense:

(From left to right: Prof. Brewer, Dr. Sassoon, Ronnie, me, the late Prof. May, and Professor from other department)

3. Today, I just heard from David Jesse, who I remember as the PM for “PicturePack Bundle” in 2001, said: “That was one of my first features as a product manager. ”