One Month At DoSelect
Last week, I completed 1 month of my internship at DoSelect. Like you'd expect, life in a startup is really fast. In this one month, I built two new featues for the product, mastered a bunch of technologies, learned how web applications work in the real world and how code is styled so that it is readable.
All this would not have been possible without the people who mentor me. The founders - Iliyas, Rohit and Sanket - are incredibly smart, hackers in the true sense. They're very hard working too. Server crashed? They'll be up all night fixing it. A bug crept into the code? They'll fix it before they go to bed. A customer is not convinced? They'll show them why DoSelect is better than any other competitor.
And I get to see it all live, the chill that runs down your spine when the server crashes or the thrill of working on a deadline, on a technology you know nothing about. It's incredibly fun.
I get the entire overview of the product, something only possible in a startup. My ideas actually get heard, and discussed, and if really good, implemented. I accompany founders to product demos, maintain server operations, write Python code that'll become a feature in the product, and even go to the local market to buy vegetables for dinner when we work from our apartment on weekends. :P
My work, though extremely fun, is not a cakewalk. Sanket reviews every line of my code and I have to rewrite it if he finds the code to be lousy. He has a keen sense of design, and every page I design goes through his watchful eyes before it goes live. Iliyas, who is the go-to-guy for all things related to servers, does not answer any queries unless they've been thoroughly googled. Rohit handles the business end (and the kitchen), and whips out some startup wisdom every now and then.
In one month, I learned a bunch of stuff that would otherwise take me a year to learn on my own, that too only if I ever knew that those technologies existed (I'll talk about those technologies in future posts).
I now know the meaning of scalability and the importance of writing well designed code. Now I have a thought process that is directed towards the benefit of the end user. And most importantly, I now have a sense of responsibility towards my code, something I had never felt when I built my own side projects.
I still have two and a half months of internship left, and hope to learn a lot more by then, and maybe share my accumulated knowledge and wisdom here.
That's all for now.
Cheers! :)