The Gojek Starter Manual
I always did something I was a little not ready to do ~ Marissa Mayer
Let’s keep this very straightforward! Here are my reflections on more than a few things a fresher is “expected” to do when he onboards with Gojek, the Super App of South-East Asia. You will be getting a sneak peek into my day to day activities for the first couple of weeks. I am trying to recall all the major highlights that were held by my psyche so that you have the idea of what to expect. It should also be noted that these are COVID affected scenarios and hence it had to be completely remote and online. I m sure, the in-office experience would have been 10X better, but nevertheless, let’s take them week by week.
Week 1:
My first day at Gojek started with a session at 11 AM from the onboarding team. It was all about setting up my workday and getting me enlisted as an employee to the company. Divided into two sessions, pre and post-lunch, every one of us was made to complete our workday profiles one by one, literally. It was awesome as well as a bit tiring to see the HRs catering to the doubts of every boot camper. The session completed at 5 PM and was a real stretch towards the end. I believe if the sessions were in-office, they would have been much less time-taking. Today, when I reflect, I know how important those sessions were. One would not want their salary to get bounced back, just because their name in workday does not match their name on the bank documents, Right?!! :P
The next day, we had sessions on POSH and Finance. POSH was mostly about maintaining a proper work culture at the office and knowing what things are NSFW (Not Safe For Work). The Finance session helped everyone with all the payment and tax-related queries and certain tax benefits that we should be aware of were also mentioned. These both were quite important. Their benefits are quite subjective at times but its always better to know the rules.
To be true, so much theory was already getting the better of me and I needed a way out. That happened to me in the form of my manager. I got a mail from him in the late hours of the previous day and somewhere in the body, it was mentioned that if I wanted to have an unofficial chat before the official catchup, scheduled for tomorrow, I could ping him on the telegram. I jumped at the opportunity XD. The first few messages were made under the impression that he is my manager, and would expect anything but formal talk, but that was soon subsided as I found myself talking about my likings, my projects, and the best, my creation, Graffitee. It felt like he was quite interested in the workings and did ask very intelligent questions around the architecture. After that chat, I knew for sure that I am amongst my kind of people and Gojek is going to be real fun.
The next morning, I had that “official” catchup with my manger. I got to listen to him for the first time over a zoom call because COVID sucks!! We talked a lot about the team, about what we do, different parts and aspects of Gojek, about life at Gojek, a bit about work and related challenges, a lot about fun, and how they do a virtual meetup every evening at 5:30 PM and play Pictionary online. Later that evening, I got a chance to virtually meet my team. We played Pictionary, 5 rounds, and time flew.
Week 2:
Over the weekend we were asked to start reading the book Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. I did give the book a start but could not keep up my interest as it felt like rote reading of the text was unhelpful in every way. Gojek heard that silent wish of mine, and a session was scheduled to assign small projects. The facilitator informed us that we were expected to model two well-known problems of Object-Oriented Programming in two languages viz. Java and Ruby. We had to refer to the Clean Code book to learn about the best practices and then use those in our code. It was for the first time I could feel the heat of the Bootcamp shining right over the laptop screens. We were given around 10 days to showcase our projects with a checkpoint in between and a mentor assigned.
It was in this week that I received my first MacBook. This is a 16" solid power machine that makes me marvel at its speed and resilience from time to time. Still in love with the three-finger gestures and the touchpad full of emojis XD.
Moving on, we had many introductions in the week and we were addressed by the Head of Engineering or Product Managers of many teams. They helped us to get acquainted with the vision, tech stack, and workings of their team. Gojek has more than 20 verticals and most of them co-ordinate on many levels to keep the Super App in shape.
The week also constituted a session on writing 101, where we were given pointers on how to write a good article or a medium story. Thoughts like making the headline click bait-ey and making your content premium were explained by the facilitator. I was particularly impressed with Gojek because they conducted a session on writing as well, amongst others. This shows that the company understands the need for a developer to write.
Gojek also has an open-source facade to its development streak. With a simple google search, you can reach the Gojek Github page where you will find many open-sourced projects that are used and scaled inside the company as well. Awesome ideas in the form of Ziggurat, Heimdall, and Darkroom were introduced to us from the project maintainers. One should go and check these out. If you feel like, do consider contributing :)
With so much going on, one might get lost or feel overwhelmed by the enormity of ideas and new concepts spoken in the zoom calls. One of the key pointers, that every facilitator talked about, was to preserve one’s identity in Gojek. It was cautioned to us that Gojek is a huge jungle of hundreds of technologies and highly-skilled engineers, hence it is important to understand why we are here and what we can bring to the table. Talking to my fellow boot campers, I understood that every one of us is quite strong in their field of development and there is a vast ocean of knowledge that lies at hand to be explored and exploited. With every day bringing in new terms and new domains to explore, one should trust that they will emerge as a better developer and a better problem solver, all in all!!
