The Interview I Still Think About

The Interview Question That Became Day One

When I joined PT. Global Pay Indonesia in late 2016 as an Android engineer, one of the first things the CTO asked me in the interview was whether I could migrate a legacy Android project off Eclipse to Android Studio. I said I could. I got the job, and a few days later I found out exactly what that project was: UANGKU, a mobile wallet issued by Smartfren under the Sinar Mas Group.

Migrating a Legacy Wallet Off Eclipse

UANGKU had been around for a few years by then, and it showed. The codebase had real technical debt, the kind that accumulates when a product goes through years of feature requests without enough time to clean up after each one. Within my first two to three days on the job, I had it migrated to Android Studio and started working through the architecture.

An Escrow System for Social Commerce

What I inherited wasn't a small app. UANGKU had a feature called Shopping Payment Request, an escrow-style payment system built specifically for social commerce, buying and selling through Instagram, Facebook, and other social platforms rather than a proper marketplace. At the time, Indonesia was seeing something like 2.7 million of these social commerce transactions a day, and most of them still ran on trust alone: pay first, hope the seller ships. UANGKU held the buyer's payment until the order was confirmed received, protecting both sides if something went wrong. It wasn't a feature every e-wallet had, and it partnered with hundreds of curated online shops to support it.

Bringing QR Payments to UANGKU

Alongside the refactor, I integrated PayByQR, a payment system built with DimoPay that connected UANGKU to one of Indonesia's earliest multi-bank QR payment networks. That was the direction the whole industry was heading, moving people away from typing in tokens and PINs toward just scanning a code, and UANGKU needed to be part of that shift to stay relevant.

None of this happened in isolation. I was cleaning up and extending a wallet that real people were actively using to buy things from strangers on Instagram, which meant there wasn't much room for mistakes. The app had to keep working the whole time.

Years Later, Acquired by Traveloka

Years later, UANGKU became one of the payment options inside TravelokaPay.

Looking back, the part I remember most isn't that. It's that first interview question from the CTO, and the three days after it. Saying yes to something before you've fully seen it, then actually delivering once you have, that's a specific kind of pressure, and it turned out to be a good way to start.

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Source: Shopping Payment Request UANGKU: Solusi Aman Berbelanja Online — Kompasiana