Arif Rakham, Technical Lead and Senior Software Engineer at eFishery, shares insights into his career path and how he’s built a creative tech team
Florian Engel
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Is a software engineering an art or a science? Arif Rakham, Technical Lead and Senior Software Engineer within the Enterprise Platform Team at eFishery, is convinced that it is both. “Yes of course it is rooted in engineering and computer science, but you need all of your creativity to build something useful,” he explained at a recent Aiven open-source data infrastructure Meetup in Jakarta.
Creating something useful is exactly what eFishery does. It’s a fast-growing, tech-enabled unicorn with a mission to build a sustainable, integrated value chain for Indonesia’s shrimp- and fish-farming businesses — and so strengthen global food security.
eFishery has developed an auto-feeding system based on Internet of Things technology, as well as an enterprise platform that includes marketplaces for selling fish and shrimp feed to farmers, fresh fish and shrimp products to B2B consumers, and financial products for fish farmers.
For an idealist and a passionate promoter of the value of technology and open source, eFishery has been the perfect place for Arif to flex his creativity and utilize his deep knowledge of software design, distributed systems and open source technologies such as PostgreSQL® and Apache Kafka®.
Arif’s career trajectory to date is impressive. In addition to working as an Oracle Database Administrator for two years, he has held software engineering roles at private and public organizations. He joined eFishery in early 2023 where he now has responsibilty for leading a team of engineers.
His team designs, develops and maintains a range of high-quality tools and libraries for internal use at eFishery. He works closely with colleagues throughout the company so that the solutions his team develops meet their immediate needs — while also making sure that they are in line with the company’s technology roadmap and its long-term goals.
And because eFishery is an ambitious company with big visions for the future, there’s a lot going on. “We’re driving the technical vision and shaping the direction of our enterprise platform as it continues to grow,” he says. “But we’re also developing individual solutions —we’re constantly working on something new.”
For example, Arif is particularly proud of a new solution for eFishery’s Risk and Anti-Fraud team. The service helps the risk team analyze transactions to detect any fraudulent activity. This kind of analysis needs to happen in real time: not just to prevent fraud, but to ensure the customer experience remains as smooth as possible.
“We have lots of systems and solutions, like the Risk and Anti-Fraud service, where downtime would be really bad for our customers — and for us,” says Arif. “We use Odoo, for example, for transaction logging. Anything to do with financial processes needs to be super reliable. We need absolute confidence in it.”
That’s one of the reasons that Arif’s team uses Aiven to manage PostgreSQL and Apache Kafka on its behalf.
“PostgreSQL and Kafka are brilliant open source technologies. PostgreSQL was one of the first open source databases I worked on and, in a previous position, when I had to choose the stack to handle banking use cases of a virtual account generator, I went for PostgreSQL and NodeJS. I’ve also used it to move service platforms from web to mobile apps. But here at eFishery, we’re building a creative tech team. I need vendors like Aiven to keep the data infrastructure running and up to date, so my team can focus on developing the applications that eFishery needs,” he says.
With a big imagination and a thirst for original thinking, Arif is always on the lookout for disruptive technologies to spark new ideas. “I’m excited about the latest generative AI and I think it’s going to radically change software development,” he says. “I want to create AI-powered apps which make life easier for their users.”
Having observed his career achievements so far, and his ability to marry creativity with logic, no doubt that’s exactly what he’ll soon be doing.
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