By Kate Rich
The eScience Staff Spotlight is a series featuring individual members of our team and their career journey. This week’s featured staff member is SSEC Senior Research Software Engineer Niki Burggraf.
From programming languages to human languages, Niki has always had a knack for translating knowledge across different systems. Growing up in the midwest, she was passionate about learning French, tinkering with graphic design software, and reading. Her interest in programming actually stemmed from that love for reading when she found herself enjoying web comics about science and computing. She recalls laughing at a punchline involving SQL coding and thought “I read that and I understood it. Can I do programming?”
She initially thought that “programming was supposed to be hard,” but it ended up making a lot of sense to her. She joined the Honors Computer Science course that focused on coding in Java. Unlike her peers, she did not come to programming from a mathematical perspective, but linguistic background. As Niki puts it, she had to learn “the language of the machine” and understand how to best communicate with the computer to get it to do what she wanted. Her classmates were still all boys when she moved up to AP Computer Science the next year, but that did not discourage her. When it came time to figure out what she wanted to study in college, Computer Science seemed like the obvious choice.
She majored in Computer Science and minored in Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. During her time in central Illinois, there was a semester where she was taking “Programming Languages and Compilers” in the Computer Science department and “Elements of Semantics and Pragmatics” in the Linguistics department. Both courses taught her something called lambda calculus, which is a formal system to represent computation. On the Computer Science side, it was used as a way to understand and represent the underlying computations occurring that would be defined at a high level by programming languages themselves or, in other words, getting at the core computational “meaning” of a program. In Linguistics, this is used to model the semantic meanings of sentences and fragments, in a way that would be independent of the human language used to express that sentence. Niki explains that “I remember feeling like it was so cool that this kind of cross-disciplinary learning environment that I’d put myself in by getting this minor helped me both appreciate this one tool that’s used two different ways, and in so doing give me a more unique perspective on the world.”
Beyond her coursework, Niki had a few internships in college including one at Amazon in Seattle. While soaking up the beauty of a Pacific Northwestern summer, she interned on the frontend AWS Lambda team working on the API that customers interacted with. In this position, she had the opportunity to go through all the stages of building a feature at Amazon including writing FAQ’s and a press release for her feature.
She found her work incredibly interesting and, as it turned out, the job came with some unexpected perks when she went to a Mariners baseball game for an Amazon intern event. Upon arriving, she couldn’t find any of the other interns she knew so she went to sit by herself when a nice redhead invited her to sit by him and a different Amazon team. She describes it as the most boring baseball game that she had ever been to; it went on for several innings without anyone scoring. Niki shares that “I guess my complaining about the game was charming enough for the nice red head to ask for my number.”
They spent that summer exploring Seattle together and decided to pursue a long distance relationship across time zones during their senior year of college. The Amazon team she worked with ended up hiring her after her internship so she spent her senior year of college knowing she was headed to Seattle after graduation. Her fellow intern turned boyfriend landed a job at Amazon too so she thought “sweet, I have a roommate when I get there.” Spoiler: she married the nice redhead. They have a beautiful dog together.
Once she was back in Seattle, she continued her work with the Amazon Lambda team, which specializes in serverless computing. Niki explains that “serverless computing is the idea that you are not paying for hardware to always be on. You are just paying for the compute time that you’re using. So if I have a function that retrieves a picture of a cat, then I don’t need a picture of a cat server to always be running in case somebody wants a cat picture. In response to people asking for cat pictures, let Lambda deal with all the hard stuff like provisioning hardware and spinning up an execution environment.” Then, you just pay for the time it took Lambda to get that picture instead of generating it from your own servers. Niki was really grateful for the six years she spent working on these systems because “it was a really good environment to learn a lot and quickly about the pain points you could have when a product really takes off, is successful, and needs to operate well at a huge scale.” While at Amazon, she also learned a great deal about how to always keep your end users in mind when building products.
Now, at SSEC she specializes in cloud computing and builds scientific software that aims to meet the users needs while thinking about what kind of interface makes sense for them to interact with. She was drawn to SSEC because she gets to do programming that gives back to the science community. Part of what excited her about software engineering in the first place, was how it could be applied to so many different things. SSEC represented a unique opportunity to help researchers across a variety of academic fields accelerate their research with new tools. She shares that “one of the most exciting things for me about working here is that I get to directly talk to the people who are going to be using the software that I develop. It doesn’t need to be an abstract exercise, it’s like an actual conversation.” The impact of her work is also a key factor in the pull Niki felt to her current position because “knowing that I’m building things out for people, that I’m directly helping people, and I can see the people who I’m helping is huge.”
Working across so many different research domains also means she learns something new every day. Whether its language, computer science, or random wikipedia deep dives; Niki has carried that love for learning throughout her career. She furthers that “the ability to have a career where, by necessity, I always need to keep learning the technical stuff” is rewarding, but perhaps it is even more exciting to have “a position where I have the opportunity to learn a lot of stuff that isn’t necessarily related to the code, but related to all the science that I’m interacting with. I think that’s really neat.”
Many thanks to Niki for bringing her interdisciplinary insights to our space. We adore your sense of humor and the high quality photos of your golden retriever!