🌊 “A world where someone welcomes us wherever we go”

Q. Hello Luca! Could you introduce yourself briefly?

Hello, I am Luca, Soonyoung Maeng, working as a backend developer at VACATIO.

Q. Please tell us about the work you are doing on the team!

I handle the backend as a whole for our B2B products, FineHost and the PMS service.

I also resolve errors that come up while operating the services and inquiries from hosts, and reflect them back into the product.

In one line, you could say I work on raising the stability of our services.

Q. You take on a wide range of work too. Is anything about it difficult?

On the development side, the PMS has not been in development that long, so there is a lot to improve. That is the hardest part at first.

And when I actually meet the hosts and management companies who use the product, there are quite a few cases where our product and their needs differ. It makes me feel that the real world is very different.

And on a smaller note, building or updating a product on top of existing legacy code is hard.

Q. I’m curious whether the expectations you had before joining have been met!

I had always had a vague respect for people at startups, so I always wanted to try working at one.

Having coffee chats with the VACATIO team, including Zeon, I got the feeling that these people do this work because they genuinely love it, beyond just making money.

When I worked at a big company it was not fun. I never really got to verify whether the product I was building actually helped users. So I always wanted to build something meaningful.

In my work now I meet hosts directly, which gives me a sense of responsibility that the product I build really does help someone — and that makes it fun. It feels like doing meaningful work.

Q. Concretely, what has changed and how have you grown compared with before you joined?

A lot has really changed, but above all I hesitate much less.

This is something I talked about with Zeon too — I used to worry a lot, always asking, “will this even work?”

But Kevin says every day that “the worst case never happens as much as you worry.” Working at VACATIO, I feel every time that it is genuinely true.

Once I learned the worst case does not match the worry, I came to see that making fast decisions and adapting along the way is more efficient.

Q. What has been the most memorable moment of your work so far?

The pajama party at the end of June stands out to me. We had done a few dawn deployments before, but they kept failing and it was rough. That day everything went smoothly and we succeeded around six in the morning. I lay down to sleep but the dopamine hit and I could not fall asleep.

I remember taking a short nap that day and then going to the bathhouse. Since then the pajama party has become something like a team culture, and I feel both sorry and grateful about that.

But I have never once thought that working through the night is hard. There is even a late-night snack time, and I get excited thinking about going to the bathhouse after I sleep. I have never thought of work at the company as toil — as grinding my body down doing overtime labor.

In that sense, “pajama party” is not a wrong name, is it? (laughs) We even wear matching pajamas and genuinely party.

* Pajama party: a witty name for a dawn deployment. by Luca

Q. Right, thanks to you we can even make all-nighters fun! So what do you consider your strengths?

I realized something recently. I tend to develop while thinking ahead about scalability and problems that might arise later. We recently added the A+B structure. At the time I had designed it so that bundling more than two products would apply automatically. So when a host’s request came in, I was able to respond quickly.

The other thing is that I am good at reconciling opinions. I tend to look at diverse opinions objectively, synthesize them, and speak from there. I think I am skilled at coordination.

Q. Then what about our team’s strength?

Everyone would agree, but I think our team is one that makes things work, whatever it takes. Even things that seem impossible get solved somehow once we start doing them. I think that is our biggest strength.

The team as a whole tends to trust Zeon and follow, and Zeon also gives the team a clear sense of direction.

Q. What kind of team do you hope we become?

This is a fun goal I came up with last week. Since we are a team in the accommodation and travel business, I hope there is a host to welcome us anywhere in the world we go.

Isn’t that a fun goal? Building a world where, wherever we travel, someone is there to welcome us. Of course that means the company has to grow that much and the service has to improve. I believe our team can obviously do it.

Q. Please tell us briefly what you would like to try at VACATIO!

Two things, broadly. On the development side, our service will keep growing, and along the way I want to steadily experience, one by one, everything you have to take care of to operate a service reliably.

Outside development, I think that when the team grows, I will need to become someone who leads and manages others, like Kevin. I might take on a manager’s role. It will be hard, but it is important work, so I want to try it.

Q. That really is a fun goal! So who would you like to pursue it with?

Our team has three core values. Among sincerity, execution, and focus, I think sincerity matters most.

Honestly, you only truly do the work if you have sincerity. We have to survive and we have to do something really big. It is not about having landed a job or started earning money — what matters is whether you genuinely share the future and the goals we dream of.

But it is hard to feel that way from the very beginning. Still, I think that feeling will come once you join our team. Working here, you end up dreaming the same dream. That is what happened to me.

So I hope people with big dreams and a positive outlook come. People with a can-do-anything mindset! Then I am certain anyone who joins our team will come to dream the same dream as us. That is something we can make happen.

Q. Right, that is something we have to do together. I hope great people join! This is the last question — any final words you would like to leave?

It has already been about four months since I joined. Not a long time has passed, but I feel I am working far more intensely and feeling far more accomplishment than in anything else I experienced in development, whether internships or clubs. I hope all of us on the team keep going without burning out, working together until we reach our goal.

If reading my interview has made anyone itch to get started, please knock on VACATIO’s door anytime!