I first encountered Base in an article entitled “Build What’s Fundable.” It was a compelling, if somewhat unintentional, sales pitch. I applied, they emailed me to schedule an interview, and I shot right back with some times. A couple days passed, I realized that there was a good chance my email hosted from a treehouse in Finland had been sent to spam, and so tried again from my school email. We scheduled an interview and a few months later I was on the road to Austin.
Once in Texas, I found myself on the Factory Software team. More specifically, WHIMSY—the software that tracks every part across its lifecycle and through deployment as part of a finished product in the field. On the team, I was responsible for running the receiving bay: parts would arrive at the factory and the first thing they would hit was my software.
So I spent a bunch of time in the factory, with workers actually using WHIMSY in their day-to-day, chasing down issues to their source and fixing them on the spot to keep the line up and running. This was quite gratifying for me. I’ve made a whole bunch of physical products, but each object has been—for the most part—one of one. Scaling the manufacture of physical goods from one to a thousand and beyond is a whole different beast, and one that requires a wealth of systems that I had never before encountered and tried to soak up at Base.
Many of the issues in WHIMSY at the receiving bay derived from suppliers sending non-compliant pallets: so I also spent a bunch of time talking to them. And not just over video-conference! I went to Mexico twice, getting valuable face-to-face time and building relationships with critical manufacturing partners. On one particularly memorable occasion, I even did some Spanish-language programming on an ancient factory floor computer hooked up to a label printer.
Working with suppliers didn’t just mean onboarding them to our systems, though: it also meant adapting our systems to their needs. More specifically, it meant EDI. I designed and standardized Base’s EDI856 format, and implemented my first-ever production Rust code to parse and process submissions from suppliers. This code has a neat trick: it presents itself to legacy ERPs as an SFTP server, while behind the scenes converting uploaded files in-memory to representations interoperable with Base’s modern REST APIs. It’s both a technically neat trick, and a great way of bridging between the needs of suppliers and the needs of a modern software organization like Base.
Having a bunch of nice dashboards constantly displayed on TVs above your desk, urging you to make numbers go up, does mean that you’re left with quality tangible performance metrics at the end of your internship. My systems received over 3,000 pallets into inventory during my time at Base. When I first arrived, 81% of pallets were received off-nominally, requiring manual and time-consuming attention before they could be put to use. By the end, that number was a mere 15%—and overall throughput had increased 16x. That’s more pallets more correct, which means more parts to build more batteries, which means more customers and more grid capacity.
Austin itself was the quite the adventure. Many had warned me about the heat, but as someone who is always cold, I found it a great joy! South Austin is the place to be, a fun and funky city in its own right with plenty to do and eat. It’s a region of short buildings and few building codes, which gives it the impression of a loose agglomeration of waystations each with their own distinct character. I cooked—grocery shopping at HEB is a big deal in Texas, I understand—bought some boots, and did a healthy amount of Cyberpunk-ing and movie watching. Would recommend.
I am so grateful to everyone at Base for making the summer such a wonderful experience for me. A huge thanks goes out to my very tiki teammates: Holden, Anjali, Emily, Nathan, Joel, Brett, Robbie, Joy, and Pruthak. I have all the confidence in the future of Base and look forward to watching its ascent.