Hello.

Welcome to the Asos Tech podcast, where we are continuing to share what it is like to work inside a global online fashion company.

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You may have bought some clothes from us, but have you ever wondered what happens behind the screens? Hello, my name is Jen Davis and my pronouns are she, her and I am an engineer manager for Asos. In this episode, we are continuing our Day in a Lifeos series with Mark, who is a senior platform engineer in our Nihub if you don't know already, day in a Lifeos series is where we speak to someone about their journey into Asos Tech and what it is truly like to work in a global fashion destination. Hi, Mark, could you introduce yourself, tell us who you are, where you live and what role do you do?

Of course. Hi and thanks for having me. I'm Mark McKillion, my pronouns are he, him and I work as a senior platform engineer in the data services team. I'm based out of the Northern Ireland Tech hub which opened last year and I was interestingly. Employee number two.

That is fantastic. Employee number two, what a thing to have on your CV. So before we get in, I just want to ask a quick icebreaker, and that is can you tell us a fun fact about yourself?

Sure. Initially, from about the age of eight or nine, I wanted to be a dentist.

Wow.

I went from 8th or nine up until 14 wanting to be a dentist. I got some work experience in the dentist that I used to go to and whenever I got there for the work experience, I realized that you look in people's mouths all day and it was a little bit disgusting. So I decided I didn't want to be a dentist.

I'm glad you've clarified that because it's always befuddled me. Why anybody would want to be a dentist and look at people's mouths all day. I'm glad I'm not missing a fantastic aspect of dentistry there. So then from realizing that wasn't your career choice, how on earth did you go from wanting to be a dentist to being a senior platform engineer?

So, lots of little moves along the way. I moved to Middlesbrough whenever I was ten years old with my mom. I lived in Middlesbrough until I was 19. I used to work in a pizza shop. My mom came home and then I followed her after. And then now I came back to Belfast and then whenever I came back, I started working the Coca Cola factory. I worked for two weeks in the Coca Cola factory and then I reached out to recruitment agency, then became a call center operator in a banking company and then decided that wasn't for me and that I would go back to university. And I went to University of Ulster and did computer science.

Wow, so you had a bit of it's interesting, actually, the call center route is quite a common route for people to get into tech. I wasn't expecting you then to drop out, so you went to Uni as a mature student, was it?

So, I was 21 when I started in the University of Ulster. I didn't have the appropriate anevil results to get into first year, but they offered an integrated foundation year where if you applied and you were the right candidate, then you could get in. So I got in through that route. I came top of my class in that integrated foundation year, which got me half of my fees paid over the coming years. And then at the end of university, I came top of my class in final year. I did the valedictorian speech in the waterfront in Belfast and I also got Project of the Year.

Wow, that's such an impressive start to your career. So, after completing your degree, what did you do next? How did you first launch your tech career?

So, as I said, I finished a little side story around the valedictorian speech. Whenever I did the valedictorian speech, it was in the same location where Barack Obama came from. So Barack Obama had came to Northern Ireland and he had done a talk in the waterfront and I was two weeks after that and they told me what the speech was, but they said, you can make slight adjustments to the speech if you want. So I said, the only adjustment I'll make is I will say at the beginning. You may have noticed that my warm up act was here two weeks ago being Barack Obamas. I wrote that at the start and during the graduation process, we had a local business owner who was talking before me and she said the same thing. So I was like, I can't say that now.

She stole your line.

She stole my lies. But yeah, whenever I graduated and with the achievements that I had in university, I came out of university thinking I am the best developer that Belfast has ever seen and that the world has ever seen. I went into my first job, which was a pharmaceutical company from America, and realized very quickly that I knew nothing. So I stayed there for just short of a year. In that time, I went from being a graduate developer up to a team lead. It wasn't really officially a promotion, but circumstances meant that I started mentoring and looking after other people. From there I've had a couple of other roles in different industries and then Asos came to Belfast and there was an opportunity that I didn't want to miss.

For sure. Just for our listeners, talk to us about what that speech is particularly and the meaning behind it. The valedictorian speech.

So it's essentially the one student will get picked by the principal of the university and then they get to deliver the speech before the graduation ceremony starts.

Wow, that was a real honor then, wasn't it.

Yeah. I was very proud of myself and I had a lot of support along the way from a lot of people within the university and my friends and my family. So I was very proud to have that.

Yeah, for sure. And I bet your mother still mentions it, doesn't she?

She does, yes.

So talk to us about being number two at Asos, Northern Ireland. How did that feel?

I had accepted a job offer at another company, verbally. I got a phone call from a recruiter and the recruiter said, Look, Asos are coming. It's going to be a big thing, would you just have a chat with them? So I said, yes, I'll have a chat with them. So they had for me at least a two stage interview process. So the first one was to make sure you fit in with the culture. And then the second one was a bit deep, dive into technical knowledge. I had a call on Friday, which was the first interview piece, and it was supposed to last for an hour, 24 minutes in the interviewer said, I think you're going to be a good fit, have half an hour back and don't worry, I'll put you through if you pass the technical thing, that'll be okay. So the next day, which was the Saturday, I went to Lanzarati on holiday. And when I went on holiday to Lanzarati, then on the Tuesday I did the technical interview from the apartment.

Oh, wow.

And then I passed that interview and then I got the offer on the Thursday, accepted that on the Friday after I accepted that our site lead, ross had been selected to be the site lead, but he hadn't started at this point in time. But it was the same recruiter who hired both of us. The recruiter told me who he was going to be and then I went and met him for a coffee. And there was the Asos announcement that said, we want to build a Northern Ireland technology center over here and we want 186 people in three years looked at each other thinking, how is that going to happen? Because the market is so competitive over here like it is in other areas. So Ross started, I started and then now I think we're up to 113. And that's one year in.

Wow.

It's been a journey.

Yeah, absolutely. It must have felt incredible, intimidating, maybe unexciting, to be right at the start of something like that.

Yeah. So essentially last year we decided that we would have the first day sauce Northern Ireland Christmas dinner, at which point there was three employees.

Oh, wow.

One of the employees had COVID. So two of the employees I E me and Ross went out for dinner in the pub and got some pub grub and had a beer too. But I thought that was a success because 66% of people from the office was there, apart from anybody who had COVID. And then you fast forward to this year and now we've lots more staff and there was 45 people. And I am scared to admit that I was saying an oasis in Karaoke based on what it was one year ago. It's insane, but also a little bit magical.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm making a note to make sure I come over to Northern Ireland for the next Asos Christmas dinner. That sounds great. So were you responsible for the kind of team formation or did you have some help in deciding exactly what this structure was going to be like in Northern Ireland?

I think because I was so early, they didn't really know what was going to happen. Whenever I first joined, I was joined in this area. Then I got moved a little bit and then I got moved around. But essentially I ended up in Data Services into a team that was preexisting to me. Joining the team that I'm in is the kind of core infrastructure and platform piece of Data Services. And I went in and met everyone who was already there, seen what they were trying to work on, and brought my own kind of flavor to that team. So, day to day look at cost optimization, security, the past alive process around how we get releases into production and what isn't automated, and how can we automate some of that stuff to make the releases easier and quicker and that type of thing.

And tell me exactly what does a Data Services team do? I've always worked in the software, kind of software creation and delivery. I don't understand fully what Data Services means.

So essentially, Data Services as a department in Asos is focused on taking all of the data that comes from the website. So what you click on, what you click on next, what you put in your basket, what you buy, that you put in your basket, what you don't buy, that you put in your basket. And all of that information comes into Data Services. And then we generate reports for the executive team to tell them kind of what people are buying and what's the most popular product. And if something's selling fast you may have seen on the Asos website, the picture will say selling fast. And that type of data comes from what we do.

What kind of tools are you using? I'm thinking that the Exec team are going to need spreadsheets. Are you using a lot of Excel? Do you produce Excel reports from the data you're generating?

So essentially we have a third party tool that we use and we pass the data over into that tool and that tool will generate the reports. There's also a piece of Data Services, which is called Exec App, and it is a custom piece of JavaScript that we have that is essentially a website that you can go to in the URL and on Black Friday see what's happening every hour. So every hour, the amount of sales that we've produced will update on that page based off the data that we've made, the data that we have, and then we have a live feed. That's what we're doing.

Cool. You might have seen them. Eight massive screens in the 6th floor of GLH showing a lot of the data you've just been describing, the total, the average bag, the largest, by the number of transactions, I'm guessing that's all coming from your data.

Exactly, that comes from what the data engineers would do. In terms of myself, I'm a platform engineer. My responsibility is more to make sure that we're able to make changes quicker. And I'm not fully involved in the data processing piece, but I'm here to make it easier to get them screens up.

So talk me through a typical day then, of a senior platform engineer and let's have a snapshot of what your days look like.

So I have two young daughters, Emily and Charlotte. Emily is four and a half and Charlotte is two and a half. Interestingly. They were both born on Good Friday, two years apart. Charlotte being in COVID times and pretty much every day is just a little bit of chaos. So my wife goes to the gym. So most mornings my morning starts with getting a coffee, getting the girls up, getting the breakfast sorted, getting their clothes on, getting Emily over to school, taking my dog for a walk on the way back from taking my dog for a walk. Get the coffee from the coffee shop around the corner, sit down for 15 minutes when everything's done, and then come into work at nine. So at 09:00, whenever I start, it's usually, what have I missed since yesterday? Or is there anything that I was potentially procrastinating over yesterday that I can get done? And then the main reason for that hour, which is a good hour, I think I get stuff done that isn't necessarily the stuff that I want to be doing. But then at 10:00 we have stand up. So then the team all comes together and we talk about where we are with what we're working on and if there's any blockers, then we can resolve what those blockers are going to be. And if there's people who need their code reviewed, then we'll highlight all of those issues at that point in time. And then from then, day to day, every day is different. Sometimes I'll be working on trying to reduce costs, sometimes I'll be trying to work on improving our secure score, sometimes I'll be working on trying to help developers be more productive. I come from a development background, so I was a developer for almost ten years and I view myself as a platform engineer, as someone who wants to take developer pain and get rid of it. So any processes that you follow, anything that you do manually over two or three times and try and make their lives easier so that they have more time to focus on writing code?

Absolutely. I think that's true for all developers. Don't they need to be able to focus on the real interesting stuff of writing good quality code and not be having to follow documentary processes, multi step processes? You want to click a button. We all just want to click a button and make our lives easier, don't we?

Exactly.

So do you have any line management responsibilities in your role? At the moment?

Whenever I join the team that I'm in, we have these academies in Northern Ireland, so we have Assured Skills academies which are co funded by the Northern Ireland government. And essentially what that means is we take on 20 people in each academy after an interview process, and then if they're successful at the end, they get a job at Asos. So three of the first academies which finished last year have joined the team that I'm in and I am currently their direct line manager. And I've been a mentor before. I've never been a direct line manager before, so I've never done one to one and I've never done evaluation and trying to figure out what score or whatever they should get. So that's been something that I've had to learn since I've got here. I've really enjoyed it and it's really changed the way I view the world, I think and view people I view people far more. I think about people a lot more than I used to, because I'm in this role and there's been challenges along the way, but I think whenever you work through them together, then it ultimately makes you a better person. And that's something that has definitely resonated with me about being in it.

Yeah. No matter how I think a lot of people that come from a development background or from a tech background or math, getting into those really difficult problems are what excites us, and trying to solve those difficult problems is really what kind of drives us forward. But there's nothing more difficult than a person trying to get all the facets together to know exactly how to give that person the best, to help them become the best that they can be. Really.

Exactly. I've learned a lot, or I've changed a lot, I would say, since I came to Asos in terms of the dei initiatives that we have, join an Asos, I didn't have he him on my LinkedIn because it didn't matter to me, didn't understand why it's important. Asos has made me understand why it's important. And also the line management piece that it's all about people and that's what's really good, the culture is really good and it's all about people making sure that you can be the best that you can be.

Absolutely. I completely agree. The dei initiatives here are cracking. Absolutely cracking. So tell me, what's the fun part of your role? What's the bit? You go, oh, yes, I've got that this afternoon. I'm very excited to do that.

So we have a thing in tech and Asus, which is Tech develops on the last Friday of almost every month, we have a day to do essentially whatever you'd like. And it's something that I've never seen anywhere or heard of anywhere else. And I think it is extremely beneficial as well as important, because you get the whole day to play with new technologies, try something that you haven't tried before, and it brings in really good ideas. And then we prayer with people on those days and do little hackathons or Asos run some sessions around technologies that are new, that I've never seen before. So I think the tech develops piece that we have on the last Friday of every month is great.

Yeah, I completely agree. Can you give us one that you've worked on recently? What was your favorite tech develops?

My favorite tech develops was probably my first tech Develops because I got the opportunity to do a certification, essentially. So I did some training on Azure, and I ended up passing a certification with Microsoft, and then that'll stick with me forever. But it gives me the opportunity to do that instead of doing it on my own time. I get that day to go and improve my knowledge.

No, I completely agree. I think having the dedicated day, no matter how committed you are to personal development, there's always that one other task that you need to do, that one other ticket, that one pull request, or I'll just do this, I'll just do that, and it gets pushed out. So having that without one dedicated day, I think is absolutely right for your personal development.

It's perfect.

I remember doing a power bi one myself. I'd never looked at the dashboards before, so it was completely new to me, and I very much enjoyed it, too. Thank you so much for joining us today. I've absolutely loved listening to your life as a senior platform engineer. And long may you enjoy your time at Asos.

Thank you very much for having me.

It's been a pleasure. Perfect.