Welcome to our Yulio VR Employee Highlight Reel where we introduce to you to an on the team - and the people whose ideas and sense of how VR and AR should work have shaped Yulio from the ground up.
The Yulio VR expert team are working in roles that for the most part didn’t exist 5+ years ago, the VR job market was pretty minuscule. So the variety of experiences that led people here have created both expertise and variety in our team. And our history may lead you to the perfect VR job.
On this week's Yulio VR Employee Highlight Reel, we’re going to learn more about Kan, one of the members of our Development Team. Kan Li is a Senior Developer here at Yulio and one of the original employees of Yulio! Kan works on both the front-end and back-end coding for Yulio, but he also has the responsibility of DevOps. DevOps is an important part of Yulio because it centers around our promise to be fast and future-proof. DevOps enables us to have faster release and deployment cycles, which means that we’re able to offer new and exciting products/features to our clients in a shorter period of time than some of our competitors. Keeping to our promise about being agile, business-ready and future-proof, Kan ensures that we’re constantly moving forward and that everything is operating smoothly and securely.
So Kan, tell me a bit about yourself.
I studied computer science at the University of Toronto. Programming is something that I've always passion for ever since I was a kid in school. I was a gamer - so I always found programming elements in those very interesting. When I first got my computer I remember being so excited so I installed a bunch of games and I’d play all day! At the time, I played a lot of popular strategy games! They were my favorite.
What’s your role here at Yulio?
So, I’m a developer like most of the guys on the development team; so I do work mainly on front-end and back-end coding. I'm also responsible for the DevOps, which is at the core of how Yulio operated. Basically, I make sure that the server is always up-and-running and ready to implement anything we’re ready to push to production. We always want to make sure that our product is operating smoothly and that our clients have the tools they need to be successful when working in VR!
How did you find Yulio?
Actually, Yulio found me. I was working at a company called KiSP before starting at Yulio. So, KiSP is essentially where Yulio took off - KiSP is a visualization software and Yulio’s sister company. Our Managing Director and CEO of KiSP, Robert Kendal, had this idea of Yulio Technologies - he wanted to use digital reality (mainly VR at the time) to better present the unpresentable. He understood the gaps in the visualization world from his work with KiSP and asked us to start working on Yulio as a project. One thing led to another, and he decided that it was time to build Yulio out as its own company! At that point, any of the programmers that were involved in Yulio projects had the opportunity to move forward and become the first employees of Yulio Technologies!
Do you find your work at Yulio more enjoyable, interesting, difficult because of the VR aspects?
So when I was at KiSP they already had this product - for one, it was massive - and secondly, it was already an established product, so most of the work that needed to be done was maintenance. The main task was understanding the app well enough so we knew how it worked when it came to investigating things like bug fixes - we needed to know where to find these issues and how to resolve them. There were also feature releases here and there, but most part we worked on understanding and tweaking the product.
In comparison, Yulio is brand new - and still is - and working with technology that’s hot-off-the-press. We’re building Yulio basically from scratch, so there's plenty of opportunities to use new technologies and apply new skills that we didn't have the chance to work with at KiSP, which as a programmer, is very exciting to do!
What was your first experience with virtual reality?
So before I came to Yulio, I didn't know much about VR, and I had never tried it for myself. So of course on day 1, Ian Hall (CPO) introduced me to VR by strapping me into his first generation Oculus VR setup. It was a tethered rig that streamed from his laptop and the experience, although the name slips my mind, was essentially a dinosaur that was chasing you. In my opinion, it was mind-blowing! I thought it was really really cool.
If you got to dream up any VR experience and immerse yourself into it, what would you choose?
I would like to see some kind of fantasy role-playing game - I think that would be cool!
Outside of your VR Job, what are your hobbies?
I enjoy gardening in my spare time - I grow all kinds of vegetables! I find gardening very rewarding... Sometimes you can spend a lot of time working on something and you never get to see much or any reward, but with gardening - the more work you put into it, the more reward you reap! So I find it very satisfying. I also like watching horror movies with my wife - I think we’ve watched most horror movies together!
What’s your favorite Friday afternoon office game that we’ve played?
One of my favorites is called “Landmine” - where you lead your blindfolded team member through a course with obstacles - it was a very fun game! I also liked a game called “Telestrations” - it’s sort of like pictionary and telephone combined into one game!
Fun fact
Well, maybe because I’m a programmer some people might not expect this, but I used to play a lot of sports! I used to be in the basketball club… I was always the tallest kid in the class, so naturally, they wanted me to join the team - but I played for 2 or 3 years. I’m also surprisingly good at long-distance running! I was first place in my school for the marathon!
We’d like to say a big thanks for Kan for taking the time to sit with us for a little Q&A about himself! Stay tuned for some more interviews with the staff that power Yulio, and discover how we’re all learning more every day about our VR job!
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