Observations from my Frame of Reference

      I work in the Seller Growth team in Flipkart. We help them improve their business by showing them different metrics and recommendations based on their and their peers’ performance on our platform. Some days back, our product-manager came up with a concept, a central page, where we would be surfacing an aggregate view of all the recommendations personalized for the sellers. We already had our backend which generates various recommendations based on different cohorts. They had to make a new system to give sellers new goals and benchmark them on the basis of their performance. This page had a beautiful UX. We implemented shimmers, animations, and confettis to be shown when the seller achieves his goal and has a benchmark upgrade. This page had to be mobile responsive to be supported both on desktop and mobile browsers. Also, Flipkart’s seller app should be able to open this page inside the mobile application instead of building a page of their own. We are constantly trying to build

       “Guddu, I am leaving now. I have to reach early today.” My father woke me up. I got out of the bed, closed the door behind him, and went back to sleep. My alarm was scheduled to ring at eight.     I am fifteen years old, studying in ninth class. I am staying with my father in a small one-bedroom rented house in Bhubaneswar. I study in a school where my father is also a teacher. He is the shift in charge for high school, a rank just below the headmaster. Today is the nomination day for the school election. In our school, a small election is conducted every academic year to choose the student cabinet. The election is held for four posts, the President, the Secretary, the Sports head, and the Cultural head. Being elected into the cabinet is one of the coolest achievements of school life. High school (eighth, ninth, and tenth standard) students get to vote in the election. Tenth-standard students are not allowed to file nominations because they are supposed to invest more tim

In May of 2018, I graduated from college. I had several job offers in hand. I decided to join Ola, an internet-based ride-hailing company in Bangalore. My joining date was 2nd July along with sixty other freshers from the top tier colleges of India. I reached Bangalore two days before the joining day. One other guy (we will call him Shashank here) from my college was also placed there. We got to know each other during the recruitment process. For our interview, we had to catch a 3 a.m flight to Bangalore from Kolkata and I stayed in his home in Kolkata for one day. His parents were very sweet during my visit.     After my flight landed I waited for him at the Airport. It was pre-decided that we will stay at a guest house for a few days, find an apartment near EGL Tech Park (our workplace was situated here), and move in as flatmates. He landed with his parents (a complete surprise to me) and we all went to the guest house. The next day I went to my cousin’s sister’s place and she insis

     How many of us are not fans of Superheros and Supervillains in Marvel and DC comics? Well, I hope many of us are. Different Superheros and Supervillains have different superpowers. But we will be talking about only one superpower today: speed. Who does not know the Flash ? He is one of the most important superheroes of DC comics. He is called a speedster, a superhero who operates at high speed. And he is not alone. There are many speedsters in different comic and movie plots like the Quicksilver who beat up the Hawkeye in 'Avengers: Age of Ultron', the woman supervillain Faora who wiped a cluster of the army and fought with the Superman in 'Man of Steel', the Quicksilver in X-Men series who was the son of the Magneto. Well don't think I am confused, the Quicksilver is a part of both X-Men and Avengers series, probably Marvel ran out of superhero names 😁. If you guys know any better reasons please comment your answers. There are many other speedster sidekicks

Today, like every day, I was going through the Economic Times app in the morning. I saw a picture in the app. It was an advertisement. I had mixed feelings about it. It was a little funny and a little annoying. I am attaching the image for your reference.      A pretty girl is reading a book in a garden or a park. She is wearing her reading specs. She is well dressed, well if I am being honest, very well dressed. She is thinking about something. She has a smile on her lips, so what she is reading must be funny and/or interesting. So what's wrong with the picture? Why is it funny or annoying? Can a girl not read a book outside? What's wrong with being well dressed? Aren't you supposed to smile while reading something funny? Oh!! Are you thinking, she should not be sitting in a park alone?      Let me stop you right there. There is nothing wrong with the girl or the fact that she is smiling while reading. She is perfect. What's funny and annoying is what the advertisemen

   I am a big fan of Prettier . As a developer, I think it makes my life easier. I can switch off a part of my brain which worries about formatting while writing code. I have integrated it with my editor. The moment I press ' save ', it formats my code. A beautiful code structure appears in front of my eyes. No worries. The first thing I do, when I set up any JS projects, is set up prettier in my workspace. Just make a '. prettierrc ' file and my editor has a plugin to detect it and my work is done. It automatically starts formatting and beautifying my code.     When I joined my current company, I had convinced my coworkers to move to prettier. They had an ESlint set up which was doing the code formatting during committing with the help of a pre-commit hook . I did not like this for two main reasons. (1) I do not like the ESlint plugin showing me spacing errors in the editor. As a result, my workspace turns red. That's why I had to disable the lint plugin in my wor

Best moments in life  are unplanned. It was the winter of 2018. The weather in Banglore was amazing. It was a season of road trips and picnics. I was staying in a boy's PG with my friend Sukumar as my roommate. After college, both of us were working in different companies in Banglore. Four months back, I had bought a bike. We would always plan that we will go on a road trip somewhere, but somehow we never could. 25th November. It was a Friday. We did not have office for the next two days. After dinner, I was watching some movie and Sukumar was lying on a sofa in the adjacent room, surfing the internet on his mobile. I got a message from Sukumar at 12.30 am. "Shall we go to Savanduraga?", the message read. "Where is it?", I asked. Sukumar came to my room and said. "It is sixty kilometers from here. We can go on the bike. I was reading reviews on the internet. People are saying sunrise from the top of the mountain is amazing." In both of our mind