From our bootcamp: Simplicity is an art!

By Koushik Krishna

Keeping things simple, isn’t.

I’ve recently started my corporate life as a product engineer at GO-JEK. This required me to pass go through a “engineering bootcamp”. The usage of “bootcamp” scared me, but I quickly realised it seems tough not because of its strict curriculum but because of the care given to nuances. The objective is to teach us to think through our actions before we act, even for something as seemingly simple as a statement in code.

My first two days at bootcamp have taught me that its not easy to break problems down into simpler pieces.

For example, what do we seek when we we show a piece of code to a colleague? A key goal is to help her understand the code as quickly as possible. The simplest way to do this is if the variables, methods and classes in our code express the author’s intent.

Sidu, our coach here, has a statement that a reasonable coach is far harder to satisfy that an angry one. He pushes us for the reasoning behind every action that we take at GO-JEK with the goal of teaching us to keep things simple.