Posted by Pranav is just over a year out of college but already has impressive credentials that show his drive to learn and be a part of extraordinary things. We met him at our Zomato Bangalore hiring event in December 2018. After his interviews with Zomato’s tech team, he chatted with us while waiting to know the outcome. Here is the story of this developer.
How did you start coding and what about it gives you a kick?
In high school I had to study C, Linux and Open Source technologies but we did little more than installing software and such. I was interested in Computer Science and joined VESIT Mumbai for my Bachelor’s. In the second year there was a coding competition to select a Full Stack Intern for IIT Bombay’s “Eklavya Summer Internship”. I got selected and I was part of a 4 member team building a stock inventory web app for an NGO working with rural Indian farmers. I worked on the frontend with AngularJS & Thymeleaf, and the backend involving Spring Framework.
Back to the classes for more learning, by 3rd year summer I wanted to get more hands-on experience in coding. During both the pre-final and final year summers, I was a GSoC Intern working with an open source organization called GNOME, where I worked on several backend and UI improvements to an application called “GNOME Logs”.
All this gave me a good exposure and work experience with code. During my final year, I worked on a project related to “Hand gesture recognition” which involved Machine Learning and image processing. In that project, we had to leverage the computing power of AWS to train our model. This got me interested in cloud computing. So I joined AWS as a Cloud Support Associate on my graduation. Next I look forward to working on an app that is frequently used by a lot of people because there’s opportunity to create a big impact with your work.
Programming being a huge world with a lot of potential to do different things and explore as much as you like, drives me.
What do you like and dislike in tech?
I like Flask because it’s a very simple framework – any beginner can learn fast and easily use it. Like Python – simple. Also, AWS is a very reliable service so it’s great that we have it out there and we use it. I’m just getting started now – not yet disliking anything and don’t know what else I might like. I’m keen on progressing my career further in backend development.
The most interesting tech challenge you’ve faced so far?
I worked on a URL shortener called Tinify. That was a really challenging project that involved doing a lot of research on system design, figure out what components and entities we need to make, and how to think in terms of scalability.
Any learnings you can share?
Be flexible and curious outside of tech, in your learning. Learn all sorts of things – topics you are interested in – maybe Philosophy or Psychology. I’ve found this, though unrelated to the core work I do, it helps me both in my work and beyond. Adds depth to your perception of problems and how to craft the solution. Balances your outlook.
Startup or MNC?
In big companies, while it depends on your team whether you learn and grow, you solely are responsible for your growth. At a startup you get to learn all round – you get to see all phases of how a product is developed – the birth and evolution of it. At this stage in my career I’d choose to work at a startup.
Thoughts on the Indian tech industry
We need to create and encourage more startups. In the US and all there are a lot of startups and a lot of opportunities for the industry to grow and innovate, which is beneficial not just for the tech industry but for everyone impacted by it and working in it. In India it shouldn’t be restricted to just Bangalore.
We need to build an ecosystem that nurtures startups all over the country so more and better ideas can become real.
Your experience with Geektrust?
I like the core idea that you need to prove yourself with some code. Individual attention is given to your code and appropriate feedback given, which helped me a lot in improving my coding. The code evaluation helped me to deep dive into model design, how to write modular and clean code etc. I’m looking forward to learning more about the concepts used in object modeling and writing scalable code before starting my work at Zomato.
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Yes, Pranav cleared the interviews and got an offer (and he accepted it) right in the middle of this interview! We wish him the very best of learning, growth, impact and everything he reaches for in life. You can know more about him at http://pranavg189.github.io/ and https://pranavganorkar.wordpress.com/
About Geektrust
Geektrust is a platform for technologists to find interesting opportunities and shape the future of tech. We meet inspiring people and companies in our work, and we see some great code written by our users. So we started the Dev Stories series, to bring stories of different developers to the world. Hope you enjoy reading them as much as we love writing them.
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