2018 is almost gone and it is time to review some of the good and some improvable events from the past year. I’ll also list down some TODOs in the end, derived from the list of things that I could’ve improved upon.

In a brief

The year started on a remote village’s railway station in Odissa, during the 2017 Jagriti Yatra. On returning from the Yatra, I was headed for some adventures in LaughGuru, work related and otherwise. I enjoyed staying at my new house in Mumbai a lot. Life was very chill until I had to depart from LaughGuru around mid of this year. After that, I spent some time learning full stack development with Python, then started applying to companies. Around mid-October, I had found a new full time job. The next two months were spent preparing for it, learning some non-tech things and just spending some good time with friends and family.

Highlights

Some things went right; planned or otherwise, and I learned a lot from them. Here are some of them from the past year.

• Visited various places in the Jagriti Yatra, spoke with many unique individuals and made friends.
• Took over bigger responsibilities of the codebase (and the tech team) of LaughGuru. Learned how major features are planned and implemented.
• Learned quite a lot of advanced CSS and some SASS, implemented designs that were way out of my league.
• Learned functional programming. Concepts were learned from Haskell, but most of the actual implementation was in Javascript.
• Made small contributions to Freedom of the Press (and some other) repositories. Got the DigitalOcean Hacktober tee.
• Learned backed development with Python and Flask. Learned how ORMs are used, schemas designed, app structured and tested.
• Landed a new job, interviewed with many companies and spoke with many interesting and smart people.
• My algorithms, data structures and computer science game in general was leveled up, thanks to the interviews.
• Learned how overflows and overflow exploits, function calls actually work under the hood among other interesting low level stuff (thanks, Hacking – The Art of Exploitation).
• Read some 15-20 (hard, soft and audio) books, most non-tech. Many were classics like 1984, Sapiens, The Mythical Man Month, The Selfish Gene and Pragmatic Programmer.
• Read Applied cryptography and Serious cryptography, got a hands on with Coursera’s Cryptography 1 course by Dan Boneh, wrote ELi5s on cryptography primitives.

Mistakes and Areas To Improve

There is always room for improvement (a lot of it in my case), and in the following points, I’ll list down my own observations and some by my friends on ways to self-improvement.

• Didn’t keep in touch well with friends and relatives.
• Wrote very little actual code, especially in the second half of the year. Didn’t learn a new language or technology either.
• Didn’t contribute to the open source as much as I’d have liked.
• Didn’t implement the cryptographic primitives that I had spent a lot of time learning.
• Spent too much time browsing reddit/youtube that could’ve been used to read books/learn something worthwhile.
• Had a private room but didn’t set up the ideal work station that I had always wished for.
• Didn’t workout regularly and got marginally overweight.
• Didn’t plan the post-LaughGuru time properly, and didn’t follow whatever little plan I had religiously.
• Got a chance to speak at a tech conference, missed it.
• Didn’t dressed up decently, or looked like a professional.

# TODO in 2019

• Web engineering, security engineering and open source needs to take front seats again.
• Make active efforts to keep in touch and maintain healthy relationships with friends and relatives, be a nice-r person to be around in general.
• Participate in opensource communities and build real, useful projects.
• Walk, exercise and meditate daily. Wake up early.
• Practice and get good at public speaking.
• Save money and travel during holidays.
• Read 24 books.
• Put into practice the software engineering best practices that I have learned in the past year.
• Remind myself that consistency and regular practice to become better at something beats one time wonders and luck on any day, and it is fun to be disciplined and process, systems oriented.

See you next year!

I hope you had a great year as well. I also hope you have a wonderful new year, filled with interesting problems, learnings and experiences.

Thank you for reading!

I went through an interesting roller-coaster of understanding what the world of computers and the internet actually looked like in real life. Having no software engineer in my family or friends didn’t help either. The net effect was that I had no idea what actual software development looks like, or how different it would be from the online programming idealism that I was exposed to early on.

It was in the second half of my college that I really understood that most software engineering jobs are not the glorious stay-up-late-night-to-save-the-world kinds. The stay-up-late-night part might still be applicable, but for completely different (and often, less significant) reasons.

So you’re excited to do good work, and have lots of energy that you wish to put into something meaningful and worthwhile, what do you do? A couple of my friends and college acquaintances decided to start their own companies, and I found that very interesting. Some went for a masters degree in western countries, and that is also a great option. For me, I decided to go work for startups.

In this article, I’ll list some interesting aspects of working for startups which I’ve learnt in my little journey so far.

Flexibility

Flexibility is being able to bend rules to fit some edge case or just be more human. Yes, the office time is 9-5, but if it makes me more productive to work 11-7, why not? Maybe I’d like to work from home some days a week, or maybe I’ll want to work more hours this month and take a vacation in the next. Not hungry during the lunchtime? Feel free to eat your meal later when you feel like. Of course, with great flexibility comes greater need for discipline and care must be taken to not misuse the trust your employer has in you.

I personally like it when things are flexible, but you must remember that things work both ways. Your employer might also expect some degree of flexibility from you (so occasional work on the weekend, longer work hours when nearing a release etc). As in the case with you in the above paragraph, be mindful about keeping it a fair transaction for both the parties.

Culture and Bonding

The startup culture is usually very friendly and informal. In case of small startups, you know almost all the people working for the company by their first names. Small talks are common, storytelling is a good way of deepening the bonding and so is sharing your lunch. At the startups that I worked for in the past, the entire team had their lunch together (or went out to have lunch in the nearby restaurants). We celebrated together when it was someone’s birthday, had a town hall once a month where the entire team would come together and present updates on what they’ve been up to.

As a result of all of that, the atmosphere was most often very positive, and when that’s the case, one looks forward to waking up and going to the office every day. It is a win-win for everyone.

Impact and Work

The next important bit is the impact of your work. In any early-stage startup, you’re sure to find loads of opportunities to build interesting features, be responsible for major chunks of the codebase and be an integral part of the team in general. A small startup is unlikely to have funds to hire multiple people for similar roles. Hence, the job will require you to take ownership and be responsible for anything that has to do with your part of the codebase, which is an excellent stimulant to do good work.

You might also need to occasionally work outside the scope of your job (talk to users, brainstorm the exact requirements, give your input in other parts of the product/service etc). It will get intense at times (the realization that you are responsible for a particular part of the product can be intimidating in the beginning), and you’d have to remind yourself that it is all part of the experience, the adventure. Like Sigmund Freud said,

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful

I certainly remember the day when I and my manager had to work till 4 in the morning to get a prototype ready for demo due next day (technically, the same day), or the last few weeks at my previous workplace where we were pushing ourselves to deliver. I feel I’m naive enough to enjoy these experiences instead of loathing them. But if that’s really the case, I’m happy to stay this way for more such adventures, for I feel the reward outweighs whatever drawback these experiences might have had on me.

Salary and Perks

In India, tech startups pay quite decently, especially if you’re in a tech or product role. Many have no official vacation policy so you can negotiate a vacation at any time. Many aspects of the job are flexible (see flexibility above). If it is a small company, you can except fewer perks (maybe just an annual bonus). As the size of the startup goes on increasing, the perks and salary increases. Note that I’m not talking about huge multinationals here which are notorious for paying very little and overworking their employees.

While how much you should earn is very subjective, there are many websites (for example) which will give you a range if you provide them with your details (like your education, skills and city). If you’re unsure about what you should get paid, these websites can help.

But note that monetary compensation is only one of the many ways you get paid at a job. Your happiness, professional growth, the network you’re building and the value your current work has on your career in the long run are some of the other currencies that you can take into account.

Caveats

While this article might have pushed you in the direction of thinking that working at a startup is without its downsides, that’s not true. Like many things in life, it isn’t binary and definitely not a black-white choice. For example, large multinational corporations would offer you more job security than a typical early-stage startup (this is less true than it used to, as I keep hearing about ‘layoffs’ in large companies in the news, but still a point to consider).

Similarly, if your goal is to make a decent sum of money, but while living as chill a life as possible (for example, maybe your priorities are your social life, family, living in your home city, less workload and responsibilities etc), then the startup life might not be the best fit for you.

With regards to finance, it should be noted that a ‘startup’ is a company trying to make money through various means (like investor funding, sales of their product etc) and things don’t always work out as per plans. In fact, a quick web search revealed that around 75-90% of all startups fail. What this means is that salaries can get delayed, extra workload if new resources cannot be hired, low enthusiasm of the team because of the previous two and many such problems. When considering a company, look for their funding status to get an idea about how they stand financially (Crunchbase is a good place to research). Glassdoor reviews and a simple internet search can also yield a lot of information that would help you in making the right decision.

Having a short interview with the founders is a good way to get to know the long-term vision of the company and the direction things are heading. Similarly, interviewing with the manager of the team that you’ve applied to (although not always an option) is a good way to see if you’d enjoy working in their team.

In Closing

Finally, don’t take it too seriously. Remember to learn and have fun, make new friends and visit new places. One thing I can guarantee you is that almost everyone you meet will have some interesting experience and important lessons that you can use in your life. Cross-pollination of ideas from one context to another is important, and that happens not just in business meetings but over lunch and coffee breaks. I hope you found this article useful. If you wish to talk about your startup adventure, or you’re looking forward to your first, feel free to drop me an email.

Thank you for reading!