Image Credits: FreepikContinuing with various firsts of my life in this lockdown that even includes making samosas, I am overwhelmed to finally introduce you to my first blog post. I have been thinking about the topic of my first blog for a while now. Earlier this week, a LinkedIn notification popped up congratulating me on my 5th work anniversary. At that moment, I couldn’t believe the fact that I have been part of this industry for so long. Feeling nostalgic, the memory lane took me to my sophomore year at IIT Roorkee where it all began. What initially was my inquisitiveness and inclination towards coding, soon transformed into my passion and a definitive career choice. Just thought to pen down this exciting journey as my first blog post and say thanks to everyone without whom this wouldn’t have been possible!
In 2013 (sophomore year), I decided to take up an internship in web development overlooking the next best options of playing cricket and watching football all summer. My offer letter mentioned and I quote: “We are a budding start-up, you may be required to work a few extra hours a couple of times in a week”. I felt excited and anxious at the same time! Interestingly, my first stint involved developing an e-commerce website, vrety.com (non-functional now), using Magento. I learned CSS, jQuery and PHP that summer. My initial apprehensions about long work hours turned out to be a great learning experience. To my surprise, I was engaged in the process to an extent that I didn't realise, was spending around 16 hours everyday throughout 45 days of my internship. This stint was unique in its own way, not everyday you hear about people learning to develop the web at a “lingerie store”!
Last day at Nikola TechIn 2014 (junior year), I got this incredible opportunity to intern with a start-up, Nikola Tech. This journey started with the ablest mentors Vikrant Pogula and Abhishek Bhayana (co-founders of Nikola Tech) alongside two dearest friends and elder brothers Vamshedhar (Vamshi) and Mehar. We worked on Angular 1, Django and had a few microservices in expressjs. This opportunity later converted into a pre placement offer. Given my love for the team and the tech stack, I made a difficult choice to skip the university placement season, kicking off my career at Nikola Tech. For a small team of 3 engineers, we felt a great sense of pride in building a product (StrawberryPOS, the restaurant OS) that catered to more than 300 restaurants across India.
Last day at Nikola TechIt was really hard to say goodbye to this amazing team after spending almost three years. When I took a strategic decision to pursue my next stint, I came across this fitting opportunity through my friend and then flatmate Prabhjot who introduced me to Flyhomes, Inc. In January 2017, when I first met Stephen Lane a.k.a Steve and Tushar Garg (co-founders of Flyhomes), they wanted to
Team Flyhomeshire me as a React Native developer, but I was determined to continue pursuing web development and since then, there has been no turning back. I was hired as a Full Stack Web Engineer and currently I’m the tech lead of Customer Acquisitions at Flyhomes. We use Ruby-on-Rails (ROR), React and Redux and I am really looking forward to working with Aditya (my current manager) who recently joined the team. In April 2020, I completed three years with Flyhomes and it has been a joyride so far. I have had my fair share of ups and downs but as they all say, the pitfalls are soon forgotten when everything turns out well in the end.
Team FlyhomesTeam FlyhomesOver the past five years, I have had some amazing colleagues who are now my close friends (Chinmay, Vivek, Prashant, Gurpreet, Preetpal and Mayank) and incredible flatmates (Samveg, Hardik, Batra, Viraat, Pranjal, Tushar and Jay). Special mention to my mentor, Steve who although was a hard task master but always inspired confidence and thrived excellence in me. It was a delight working with you, Steve!
Noida Flatmates(PS: You can read more about me at Flyhomes Blog ;) )
- ABM