TIFFANY QI
Hi! Iʼm a fullstack engineer with a track record of getting things done. Currently focusing on providing delightful user experiences at Mixpanel. Incessant data collector and organizational wizard. Was top on Hacker News once.

About

Iʼll say it straight, my path to engineering was not a conventional one. I began halfway through college at UC Berkeley in 2014 simply curious about computer science. The intro class was really hard, but somehow I persevered, and became close with my computer science peers who understood the struggle. From there we created Computer Science Mentors, a team of 100+ amazing volunteers furthering supporting the Computer Science department through tutoring and mentorship when the class enrollment billowed to over 2,000. The people here meant a lot to me and that was only the start of what was to come.

It wasnʼt until 2017 when I joined Mixpanel as a support engineer that I realized all of my life I just wanted to build and create things with my own two hands. Ever since I set foot at Mixpanel, all I was doing was developing side projects in my spare time filling some sort of gap in our team, and so I was fortunate to have been able to path to engineering in 2018.

If you give something to build, Iʼll go and do it to the end. I enjoy filling the possible gaps in teams, and often take the role of impromptu lead simply through my extensive knowledge in what everyone is currently working on in the project and communicating obstacles and progress clearly. And while not flattering, Iʼm good at the glue work necessary to take the project to completion.

Unfortunately, Iʼm not your standard developer who has been tinkering away on their PC creating games ever since they were 12. However, I bet my unconventional background, drive for completion, and role flexibility might surprise you just a bit.

Experience

Software Engineer, Mixpanel
Jan 2018 - Present
Customer focused full stack software engineer using Typescript/Javascript (Panel) and Python (Django). I specialize in collaborating with design to build our vision and communicating exactly where we are in a project and taking a project to its completion. Some of my projects include:
  • Boards. Complete reshift of focus from a report centric to a dashboard centric Mixpanel. Built a large majority of the front-end experience.
  • Users. Tech lead for the users page (formerly known as Explore) redesign. Architected and built around half of the new front-end experience.
  • Content discovery. Improvements to search and how users discover content. Built the front-end experience.
  • Festive mode. Pretty holiday theme. Took a random idea from nothing to completion in a single month: falling snow in the navigation and using a custom winter spinner. Very well received by customers, one of the highest engaged posts on social media.
  • Impact report. Report that shows you user activity and conversion in relation to specific event. One of the main engineers on the project, focused on the front-end.
Support Engineer, Mixpanel
Oct 2016 - Apr 2018
Delight customers with magic by solving challenging technical problems and empower users to learn from and develop actionable insights from their own data. Some of the projects Iʼve done:
  • Onboarding app. Supportʼs training guide during the onboarding process that shows their calendar, their milestones, and extra notes about a training using Javascript and Django
  • Technical trainings. Develop technical trainings teaching new support engineers about our API endpoints, creating scripts, and implementing Mixpanel server-side.
Software Engineering Intern, Student Information Systems, UC Berkeley
Jun 2016 - Oct 2016
Full stack software engineer intern using Javascript and Ruby on Rails. I spearheaded the final exam schedule card feature, which was finally released in 2018. Also ideated an internal tool for management to track and communicate Cal Central changes to all users and stakeholders.

Notable Projects

Apr 2017 - Dec 2017
Matches coworkers from different departments and locations for lunch or coffee. Handles differing timezones and matching gracefully (Django, Python, HTML, JQuery/JS, Heroku, Google Calendar API, Google Plus API, CSS)
June 2016
Analyzed my productivity and drew correlations between four years of time, grade, and class data at UC Berkeley. Received over 57K views to date, and ranked Top 15 on Hacker News for ~5 hours (Python, Google Calendar API)

Contact and Other media