From our bootcamp: A new journey

By Divya Nagar

I graduated from IIT Jodhpur in 2016, and worked for just under a year before joining GO-JEK in Bangalore, India.

Before joining, I was not sure that if I was making the right choice as things moved pretty fast. Within a period of two weeks, I cleared the GO-JEK interview process, resigned from my previous company and joined GO-JEK full-time.

I’d already pestered many of my seniors who are at GO-JEK with questions about work, culture and future opportunities, but you can never be sure about something until you’ve tried it yourself.

After my first days at GO-JEK, I was sure that I’d made the right choice.

In the initial induction sessions by my colleagues Vivek and Sidu, I heard many things which really interest me.

Before I joined GO-JEK, I was under the impression that I write good code, follow all programming principles and adhere to good coding practises. Even during my first round of interviews at GO-JEK, I’d realised that I am poor at functional programming and know hardly any core principles. Over time, I realised that all I knew was how to make things work any which way I could.

I was kind of scared at the start of the five week bootcamp GO-JEK runs for all it’s grad and junior hires, but my first two days taught me more programming principles than I had learned during my entire college life.

Even though I have not applied all of them in practice yet but I am sure that in next 5 weeks I will be using most of them and will become better both at programming and life skills.

These are the things which I learned in first two days of bootcamp. Over the coming weeks I will learn to apply all of these in real life situations.

1. First focus on the problem and understand it rather than jumping to identifying solutions
2. Be right even if you lose the argument
3. One person fails, the group fails
4. Popular is not always right, make informed choices
5. Rephrase and you will understand better
6. Ask…Ask….Ask…until you get every single bit of it
7. Question everything, “Why this?” and “Why not that?”
8. Be expressive
9. Choose your words wisely
10. Code branching contradicts Continuous Integration and leads to merge hell
11. TDD

Watch this space for more updates!