7 years into Software Development

Today 1st July in India time, marks my 7 year work anniversary and I was lucky enough to work across great companies. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratification and reminiscence a bit about the past and what I aspire to do in next 3-5 years.

A road with ups/downs and curves (Image from Unsplash)

I started off with a e-commerce startup Myntra in 2015 and would like to thank Ashutosh bhai and Deepak for their massive influence and shaping my thinking about tech. We were able to scale data engineering for multiple EORS event and it was great fun at the start (hope it’s all automated these days). The excitement faded by the 3rd time of scaling up and down for an event. Companies should realize interesting things become boring if done over and over again :). Meanwhile I was also very curious about Big Data and Open Source and behind the hood working of those software(s) like Hadoop, Spark, etc.

I looked around and Cloudera (then Hortonworks) seemed to be the perfect fit (OSS + Hadoop). I jumped ship and started working on HDFS/HIVE replication platform. I learnt a thing about Hadoop and it’s vast ecosystem. Also, got to meet a lot of cool people and Pravin has been my go to friend for anything/everything. During my stay here, I wanted to work on the core Hadoop filesystem but sadly that didn’t work out. The next step was obvious to try and join the poster boy of cloud providers, AWS. The process wasn’t the most simple one. It took almost 8 months from solving the coding exercise to joining the company.

My first international stint (Dublin) and I was part of the platform team of ElastiCache building API(s) and systems for thousands of customers. Being a customer of AWS to building it, got to learn the things happening behind the hood, so many pieces working in tandem to make things happen on the click of a button on the console. Then I always wanted to work on the core of Redis and was always looking a way to contribute. There came the amazing Madelyn Olson, who is an amazing leader, played a major role in helping me become a part of Redis contributor group. Currently I’m part of the Redis core engine team and looking to improve the performance and timely delivery of the software to our customers.

Anyone who is about to start or are early into their career. I would like to share few advice.

1. Mentors are very important and critical for your growth.
2. Always ask for what you want. Don’t shy away from asking for help, work, etc. This increases the probability of getting what you wish for.
3. There will be ups and downs. Embrace it. Hold strong during the tough phase.
4. Patience is key to getting success on the long run. With the current effect of social media, we’re looking for instant success and achievement. Place big bet to achieve across 1–2 years. If that doesn’t work out, feel free to look out for other opportunities.
5. Don’t make decision solely based on monetary benefits. Work, team, management all of these play important role to your success and well being.

Aspiration for next three years.

1. Become healthy and fit.
2. Do more open source contributions. Currently focused on Redis.
3. Take a break. I want to take rest for few months and do the above :D. Moving across 3 countries in the span of 3 years was interesting but has taken a bit of toll.
4. Mentor juniors.

That’s all for today. If you’ve reached to the end of this story, I also like to write tech blogs, here’s the most recent one, have a look.

Redis Optimization: 1 % at a time

Have a great day, Ciao!