Hi! My name is Hiep Vuong and I head up the engineering efforts at ApplyBoard. At heart, I’m an Engineer who’s always looking at how technical solutions and methodologies can be used to solve problems in practical ways. I firmly believe that systems, technologies, and processes all need to bring some element of incremental value, even if that value is not initially obvious.
Engineering at ApplyBoard
With this mindset, I’ve spent the last couple of months pondering how to utilize modern development approaches and concepts to help ApplyBoard in its mission to #EducateTheWorld. Specifically, I’ve been looking at improving our international student applications service, as well as applications management.
I’ve always been of the mindset that you first need to define the problem before you state the solution. It’s far too easy for us in the Engineering world to believe that microservices are the solution to any web/service problem. As an Engineer, I believe we can make virtually anything work, but that mustn’t be confused with whether we should.
In the upcoming blog series #EducateTheEngineer, I’ll be chronicling our decision journey at ApplyBoard. We’ll explore the determination of how to apply modern approaches such as CI/CD, microservices, and containerization, and whether they are actually good solutions. We’ll also discuss the trials and tribulations of leveraging Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and other related systems and approaches. Last but not least, we’ll look at the human impact of these choices.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned for the first post in ApplyBoard’s #EducateTheEngineer series! If you’d like to help solve problems with us, take a look at the open positions on our career page and join our team!
Hiep Vuong
Vice President,
ApplyBoard Engineering
