Rakina's site

Work stuff

Browser engineering @ Google Chrome (2017 - now)

I joined Google's Chrome team as a Software Engineer straight out of undergrad in 2017, and became a Senior Software Engineer in 2020, and later on a Staff Software Engineer in 2023.
I love working on Chrome and the web platform, and have contributed to multiple areas, from the rendering pipeline to the navigation architecture to cross-browser web platform standardization.
One of the greatest part about working on an open source browser and the web platform is I can talk about most of it anywhere I want to!
So, here are some selected highlights: (Note: you can click the TL;DRs to expand/close details, thanks to the magic of HTML):

Navigation & Security Architecture (2020 - now)
TL;DR: Making Chrome's navigation architecture simpler and more secure!
- Navigation is what happens when you instruct Chrome to go to a webpage, through clicking links, updating the adress bar, etc.
  It feels simple, but see this great Chrome University video on how many things are involved in navigation!
- I am one of the owners of the //content layer (content/OWNERS) in Chromium, responsible for the architecture of Chromium's //content layer (the 'core browser' part of Chromium, see also the README), what it exposes to embedders, etc.
- As a member of the Chrome Security Architecture team and owner of navigation & BFCache code, I also often guide engineers and teams needing help with navigation.
  If you are changing code in that area, please feel free to send the CL to me, or ask questions to navigation-dev@chromium.org!
- I have been working on reducing the dependency of Chrome's browser process on the untrusted renderer process on navigations.
  See also my BlinkOn Lightning Talk (and the slides), where I explain this project through Spongebob memes in front of 100+ people (virtually, thanks COVID!)
- I am also working on RenderDocument, a large refactoring/rearchitecturing project that improves the representation of frames and documents in the browser process.
Back/Forward Cache (BFCache) (2019 - now)
TL;DR: Caching pages for instant back/forward navigation.
- With this feature, Chrome can cache pages that you recently visit to allow instant back/forward navigation to them.
  See this web.dev article and my n (with English subs) video on what that means!
- I was one of the main engineers that helped implement & ship the initial version of Back/Forward Cache, and I am one of the owners of BFCache in the codebase.
- I improved the hit rate (page caching & restore rate) after shipping by more than 2x,
  through investigating what's preventing caching and designing & implementing solutions for them!
  The most notable one is adding same-site navigation support.
- I'm actively leading the standardization of back/forward cache.
  Back/Forward Cache exists in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, and we want BFCache's interaction with web pages to be interoperable.
  Also, most existing web platform features used to not define what happens to them when a webpage using them is cached,
  lowering the hit rate or even causing undefined behavior. We are actively fixing those specifications.
  I've also updated W3C's Design Principles doc to add BFCache considerations, so that future web platform APIs are designed with back/forward cache in mind!
content-visibility (2018 - 2019)
TL;DR: Lazy rendering for webpage contents outside of the browser's viewport.
- CSS feature to allow browsers not render parts of a webpage that are not visible to the user, saving a lot of rendering cost! (80% in the article below)
  See this web.dev article on what that means!
- I was one of two main engineers that helped implement & ship the feature.
  I designed and implemented the CSS pipeline optimizations that's needed to save rendering cost,
  made it work with various features like find-in-page, and helped parts of the standardization.
- Fun fact: The project went through various renames and API redesign, including: Find-in-page API -> Searchable Invisible DOM -> Display Locking, rendersubtree -> content-visibility. Fun times!
Web Platform Standards (2017 - now)
TL;DR: Interoperability on back/forward cache, focus, and weird parts of session history and navigation.
- I have represented Google in various web platform standard bodies (W3C, WHATWG, CSSWG), in online (Github, etc) and offline (TPAC, etc) standards discussions.
  I have improved the state of standardization and interoperability for various web platform features, impacting Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and other browsers!
- I'm actively leading the standardization of back/forward cache.
  See the Back/Forward Cache section of this page for more details.
- I helped improve the specification for focus in the HTML standard, which wasn't in a good state and not ready for additions like WebComponents.
  See my WHATWG Blog post about it!
- I standardized, implemented and shipped Constructable Stylesheets, which allows for lightweight styling of ShadowDOM with reusable CSS objects.
- Related to my navigation work, I like to standardize weird corner cases related to session history and navigation that I encounter, like the initial empty document.
  See also my BlinkOn Lightning Talk (and the slides), where I try to explain the horrors of doing so.

Older work stuff

When I was an undergrad in University of Indonesia (2013 - 2017), I tried multiple internships and part-time jobs:

Part-time Software Engineer at Traveloka in Jakarta (Indonesia), Jan-Aug 2017.
Worked on the Accomodation team on backend services for the Hotel product.
Software Engineering Intern at Google in Mountain View (CA, USA), Jun-Aug 2016.
Worked on a Natural Language Generation data collection system for a Research & Machine Intelligence team.
Software Engineering Intern at Square in San Francisco (CA, USA), Jul-Sep 2015.
Worked on a marketing & recommendation system for the Caviar team.
Software Engineering Intern at GDP Labs in Jakarta (Indonesia), Jan-Feb 2015.
Worked on deploying a CI/CD system with an automatic vulnerability scanner.

If you are a CS student interested in doing software engineering internships but don't know how to even start, I felt the same way a couple years ago too!
So, I wrote a hopefully-still-relevant guide on how to approach it.
Feel free to shoot me questions after you read them.

Personal stuff

I love bullet points, so here's some:

I am an Indonesian and a woman, and I love to give back to Indonesian and women-in-tech communities and efforts.
For the past couple of years, I've spoken at multiple tech talks & panel sessions to share my work and personal experiences in tech.
Feel free to contact me with any opportunity to do that!
I also mentor students/early career engineers through Google's community efforts such as the Bangkit program (for those in Indonesia) and the STEP Development Course (for those in Japan).
Feel free to sign up for them!
My favorite things recently are:
- Studying security stuff, to be better at my job :)
- Snowboarding - I started in Winter 2020 and quickly fell in love with it (after hating it for a bit :) )
- Scuba Diving - I have the SSI Open Water & Advanced Adventurer certification, and eager to learn more!
- Traveling - When it was a thing. Pre-2020, I used to do a lot of business travel to conferences and Google offices, and often do personal trips after.
  See thread on my travels in 2019!
- Learning 日本語 to survive - I passed JLPT N3 (Intermediate) in 2018, and have been working towards JLPT N2 (Advanced) ever since (got lazy :) )
- Trying out new hobbies: Thanks to COVID, I've tried various things to varying degrees of success:
  - Stand-up paddleboarding - Great, but I need to live near a large body of water...
  - Surfing - SUP was a better experience, but eager to try again :)
  - Gardening - harvested lots of tomatoes before my neighbor complained and I stopped :(
  - Baking, cooking Indonesian food - Great when I have time :)
  Happy to try more things!
I learned how to code when I was 13, had my first internship in San Francisco when I was 18,
then moved to Tokyo when I was 20 to start my full time job at Google after graduating from university.
In a previous life, I was an annoying teenager that based my whole personality on liking computer science, especially competitive programming, despite not being the greatest at it :)
Some selected highlights from that time period:
- My team (Awrakin - best name ever!) qualified for and competed in the ACM ICPC World Finals in 2017 after we. We didn't win it, but it was fun!
- I got the highest bronze medal in the Asia Pacific Informatics Olympiad (2013). I was literally 1 point away from Silver and still a bit salty years later.
- I got a gold medal in Indonesia's National Science Olympiad in Informatics (2012).
  I then attended the TOKI training camps for the International Olympiad of Informatics and got to the penultimate stage (top 8 students).
  I loved the experience so much, and voluntereed to be part of the TOKI scientific committee for the 2014-2015 period!
- I won a bunch of national and international programming contests in high school and undergrad.
  The most important part is that those unknowingly helped me practice for SWE internship interviews before I know they were a thing :)

Rakina's site

Intro

Work stuff

Browser engineering @ Google Chrome (2017 - now)

Navigation & Security Architecture (2020 - now)

Back/Forward Cache (BFCache) (2019 - now)

content-visibility (2018 - 2019)

Web Platform Standards (2017 - now)

Older work stuff

Personal stuff

Contact