Resume

To keep my career path aligned with the goals I have prepared for myself, I decided to join Postman as Software Engineer.

I have a particular interest in dev tooling and plan to work on a few side projects around dev tooling myself, so Postman was the perfect choice to learn and understand about dev tools.

Also the scale at which Postman is operating is huge and I am hoping to contribute to the upcoming successes of the company soon.

I am joining the Workspaces team at Postman and hoping to contribute to the success of the project and grow both myself and the company. 🧑‍🚀

I follow a content creator on Instagram called @loewhaley and I like her content regarding some phrases that you might really feel like saying but what you can say instead to make it a bit more "professional".

Of course, most of them are satirical but some are actually very good. I found myself noting down a few of these in a markdown file. So instead just created a simple static site with this data and added features of making it easier to search and give a way for anyone wanting to print them or save them as PDF.

With this, the project "How to professionally say" was born. This project got a lot of traction from the community at Hackernews and Reddit and the site blew up.

This is an amazing experience and I have written a detailed blog about the technical side of the project which you can read more by checking the link below.

During my college days, I had a few seniors who started working at Cimpress. I had heard nothing but good things about the work and culture of Cimpress so naturally, I wanted to explore an opportunity at Cimpress.

Unfortunately, I could not get the chance to work at Cimpress as soon as I graduated but later down the line I did receive an opportunity at Cimpress and wanted to try it out so I took it.

I got to work with amazing colleagues and interacted with lots of great engineers working in my domain. I worked on services that helped Cimpress's MCP (Mass Customization Platform) with the fulfillers and vice versa connecting notifications from fulfillers to the MCP.

I got the chance to work on both independent backend services and UI components as well as work on improving features of existing services.

Situations were getting bad, the companies I had offers from were uncertain about how they would be handling the situation with new hires, rumors were going around about companies rescinding offers (and many companies did).

With no clear response from the company I was planning to join, I had no other option but to get back up and start the job hunt once again.

I felt that startups were a nice place for me personally because I always loved working at startups even during my internship periods, there were quite a few who were hiring software engineers and yet alone freshers.

There I came across a job posting by PeopleGrove which was asking for 1+ year experience candidate but I still went ahead and applied for it.

Luckily I got a call and was scheduled for the 5 rounds of interview, I was grateful that they extended me an offer (even though I was technically not yet graduated since my exams were delayed). I joined PeopleGrove as an SDE-1 🎉

Being a small startup, their product was humongous. Since it was a small team I had quite difficulties initially understanding the modules and the projects that were governed by the team I was joining. Naturally, I was able to contribute more to the projects.

I was able to complete two major projects and worked on a supplemental release of an existing project. It was a great experience and the people there were awesome both technically and personally.

A funny story, on my last farewell call, I was called by almost everyone "the guy who asks a lot" 😅. Being my first job I had tons of questions both about the technical projects and in general about the company. Thank you Nikesh for answering all of my questions regarding taxations so patiently 🙂 and everyone else with whom I had a chance to talk and work.

So it was the starting era of the Covid19 virus, colleges were shut and there was no information about my final B.E exams. Naturally, everything had stopped and there was no certainty about what is going to happen.

Given these situations, I knew I should not waste my time and instead try to find some opportunities till things go back to normal (as I hoped they would in a couple of months 😑). I started looking for some startup that is hiring interns or contractors and I came across Frontier Techworks. (Sad to see their site is down 😧)

I worked as a Full-Stack Developer, majorly focusing on the backend and worked on their new project called FreshVet.

I worked on core modules which included Mobile OTP based Authentication, Real time chat using websocket subscriptions, Appointment Booking System, Smart Scheduling for Vets, Firebase Push Notifications etc.

At the ending phase by extending my duration I also worked on in integrating the APIs on the web client with Gatsby using Apollo client.

With a help of a friend, I also started working on a contract basis with Serrala.

I worked as an Angular developer on their project of one-to-one migration of the web portal of Serrala Alevate. My day-to-day task used to be fixing and improving the legacy codebase and adding new features as planned by their roadmap.

This was a rather different experience compared to working as a freelancer and intern but I loved it.

Working as a freelancer gave me confidence and experience in working as a solo developer, I wanted to experience a bit about how a developer works in a corporate environment.

Although I always loved working in teams in many of these competitions, working at a company is a different experience, hence I started applying for some Internship opportunities

I wanted to experience more on the dev side of the things so I choose to mostly do internships in early-age startups where I can learn more about the engineering side of the things and I was fortunate to be able to get my first opportunity in one such startup.

I worked at MagTapp as Backend Engineer, I remember when I joined they didn't even have any Backend engineers specifically, just a few people for Android app development, So this was a great opportunity for me to learn and explore.

This went well, well enough that they decided to increase my stipend by 50% due to my work performance and ethics.

Something was odd with how my college life was going on. On one side I was enjoying the part of participating and building solutions during all these competitions and Hackathons, in some we won and in few we lost but one thing was very common in all of these competitions...

Once the competition was over, the project would get archived and thrown into a `/dev/projects` folder on my system and never saw the light of a day. I never experienced how these projects would survive if thrown in front of users and felt this is something that is lacking for me. Hence I started working as a freelancer.

This was a turning point where the projects I was building were not closer to the technical solutions I was developing in the competitions but instead, I was able to put the projects in hands of users and test things out, iterate over the feedback and build amazing user-friendly features.

I started this as a fun and learning activity but it turned out to be one of my best decisions, so I continued this from mid-3rd year to my final year.

In total I had build around 6 projects for different clients (both national and international)

In a few months, there was another Hackathon hosted by Universal College of Engineering.

I and my team decided to participate in this and we won first prize this time 🏆. I remember we were exhausted to even celebrate but it was an awesome feeling indeed.

Here we were, participating again in the Hackathon at VCET for next year. But the results were different this time, not just we got selected for the top 5 finalists but we also won second prize 🥈.

During my second year, I participated in a team of three in the first Hackathon which was hosted by VCET. Starting with learning Java and MySQL, we build a desktop application using Java Swings connected to MySQL database called SafeStepz

It was a portal made for government employees to keep track of the number of users available on any certain bridge Railway station.

We were the only team from the second year that was shortlisted for the top 5 teams and got the chance to present the project in front of the panel of judges. That was an amazing experience that motivated me to continue this journey toward software development.

Well let's start from here, So I completed my Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology from V.C.E.T. One primary reason to select the college was that it was closer to where I stay and also that I was not very adventurous to have a daily commute like this

I was able to find my interest in web development when I started participating in Hackathons which were helpful to make an early decision on what all things I wanted to learn which included HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Later I started with Backend technologies with Node.js and MongoDB

Also I, along with my friends founded the Core Coding Committee where we focused on peer learning. I became the Technical Head of this committee and it was a nice experience.