New journey: 1st Month at Gojek
A new phase, new journey, new learnings…
Just coming out of college with countless memories and moving to a new phase of life where you show and implement what you have learned in the past 18 years of education.
I started this “Real-world” phase with Gojek. I joined Gojek as a Product Engineer earlier this month.
What’s Gojek? Never heard?
Some of you might have heard Gojek, but mostly not since it is not live in India.
Gojek is a Super App. It’s one app for ordering food, commuting, digital payments, shopping, hyper-local delivery, getting a massage and two dozen services. App currently is providing services in multiple countries including Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam to name a few.
I joined Bangalore office in July. I’ll share my quite awesome journey at Gojek till now.
But wait, before I begin, a few common questions I get when I mention my being a product engineer are :
- What is the role?
- How is it different from a software engineer/developer?
A product Engineer is basically not just a developer who is responsible for a feature. It is all about the product from start till end. You are expected to make your product work, do some research, make specs, be aware of use cases, etc. It is basically being a 10X Engineer who understands the need and the audience of the product.
Work and Stuff 🚀
The first week was mostly about getting involved in how things work at Gojek. —
- What are the principles and values of Gojek?
- Basic insights on the scale it works at. How is it impacting people’s life?
- What is expected of a product engineer?
- Life at Gojek ❤
I was handed over my Macbook Pro 💻 , a lot of goodies including stickers, a laptop bag, a bottle, and chocolates❤️ on the first day itself. Then I was allocated a mentor with whom I had a quick discussion about the team and of course meeting a whole bunch of super cool engineers on Day 1 itself.
Mostly you would have heard, people starting with sessions, lectures, and all those boring stuff, but mine was different. On the second day itself, I was conveyed a task (like an intro project, a tool for internal purposes — basically it was a slack bot).
And my new learnings began, I wrote python code to make a quick working demo ( who doesn’t want to impress on day 2 😜)
The next day, my mentor told me that this is good, but I should write this project in golang since it is used at Gojek. Yes, I started with golang ( It’s just day 3 😇)
I learned through basics in the first week, and started out with (not so nice) code, making this work. One of the important things at gojek is TDD (Test-driven development), which I did not really follow at first, but eventually realized that it makes your work fast, easy and reliable.
Post that, I am jotting down my learnings in form of list instead of boring paragraphs. 😬
Things I learned 📓 🙌
Golang :
- Basic syntax, loops and stuff
- Working with API calls using net/http
- How to properly use interfaces and structs (it’s a bit tricky)
- How to write tests/mockups in golang?
- Testing, coverage, linting, and making builds
Development Stuff :
- How to set up CI/CD (Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery)?
- How to write Makefile
- Project structure and language practices
- Read the Pragmatic Programmer and Clean Code.
- Started with touch typing (properly 😛)
- Started using spacemacs ( Vim + emacs )
Product management and work practices :
- How do teams actually work effectively?
- Daily standups, IPRs, Meetings, Dev huddle
- Pair Programming
- TDD ( Test Driven Development)
PS: I did complete my slack bot, couldn’t deploy before bootcamp due to the long security and deployment process.
Culture 💃
Hands down, Gojek is one amazing company to be a part of.
Highlighting some cool stuff here —
- Free coffee/food all day ( Healthy stuff i must mention)
- Free lunch
- Recreation area with TT, Playstation, Pool, Foosball, etc
- Flexible working hours
- Everyone is open to hearing and sharing thoughts
- People are quite good at their jobs (Quality over Quantity)
- Cultural events and gatherings — Movie outing 🎥, team outings 🍺, sports day 🏅( Recently gojek had rebranding)
It’s been a pretty amazing journey so far. That’s all for now, will be sharing my journey and learning ahead. Check out my other post relating to Bootcamp I am a part of here.
Also, Gojek is growing at an incredible scale. Check out gojek.jobs for more.
Know me more: mohitkhare.com
