Software Engineer journey at Meesho | 4 months experience | Android
Is Meesho a good company for you to work ? Let’s find the answer of this question through my journey !
I will try to make this question-answer and story type of journey experience. Before joining Meesho, I was doing Bachelor of computer science at Mumbai University and android development course at Masai School.
So, first question which I get most on social platforms-
How does your professional life changed after you joined Meesho ?
After placement, I got selected for SDE-I(Android) at Meesho. It was just a whole new experience throughout the 6 months of journey studying in Masai School which carried so much memories that will be long lasting. Definitely, Life changed !!
You will have the opportunity to work on projects impacting millions of lives. This is true only when you are in the right team at the right place though. You will have better connections, better pay-checks and networking you get. It shape you from within. They push you to release things faster. They give you enough chance to make mistakes and improve. So if are you looking for diverse skillset then there is enough opportunity for you at Meesho.
Early Days experience-
My first day at Meesho was quite remarkable. The online environment was astounding. That moment I knew that I would learn a lot from this place and people. The day mainly consisted of new hire orientation. HR took induction session and gave us overview. I was informed that I am part of Discovery team.
On first day, I virtually 😄 met with my manager aka Pratik Kumar. Pranay is like buddy-mentor. He is very friendly and I could feel all my nervousness oozing away. He explained me what I am going to work on. He told me that learning is more important than anything. He gave me access to account and tool like Postman, Github, Google-play-console, Firebase, Jira, etc. The first few weeks, I got enough information from each department like Data science, Farmiso, Security, Supplier, Discovery, Android. After two weeks, Pratik assigned me first task “Null values in Sort Type”. I got context of this issue from Snehil and with the help of Pranay, I was able to solve this task. Further, It was tested by Khushboo and Mehul. With one iteration, task on the way for release.
Solution of first task -Event was getting called whenever user is scrolling through the ForYou page even if the sortFilter is having a null value. So we added a condition for event to be called only if sortFilter is not giving the null value.
Android codebase is quite big 😜 and messy and it takes lot of time to understand and I am still trying to understand (Each day, android platform team is improving codebase and working on modularization 🥳)
I had received a great deal of help at every step especially from Pranay. Regular updates with the team were shared in daily standup meetings. After One month, my manager changed from Pratik to Nithyashree and I became part of newly created team -Meta Feed
Through Midway -
Being part of Meta is one of the best thing happened to me. Here, Team members are interactive and friendly. Honourable mention —
Nithyashree, Saurav, Priyanka, Jigar, Shriyog, Shubham, Nandeesh, Manan, Nidhi, Me(Mausam😜 )
Sprint retrospection were organised by our team lead Nithya after every 2 weeks where we discussed about the problems faced during the sprint or how should we improve, what will be the plan for next sprint. The kind of freedom and progressive work culture here is overwhelming.
Next adventure begins now, One of awaiting Quality Compression feature was about to be executed.
Pranay, Jigar, Nandeesh, Shubham and me got assigned to QC.
Through Endway -
From QA team, Vinay and Shweta joined to do Quality assurance. We went through PRD(Product requirements document) and started to make android and backend solutioning. One thing to note here is that, most of the members were new to the team along with codebase(recently joined meesho). Due to which lots of back and forth happened between product manger-backend-frontend-QA-Design team which leads to extend in time. But one thing is sure, we learnt lots of thing. In between, We feel like giving up and taking rest but the feature was so amazing that we couldn’t resist ourself to keep going until it’s completed.
Hustle, Hustle and more…
There were more late nights and weekends working at QC feature.
Do you find this feature interesting then update the meesho app to latest or wait for QC feature blog. Finally -in May, Our feature went live and we couldn’t be more happy 🤩🥳🤩
Things I found fascinating here
- Open work culture. You can walk around anywhere(slack) and talk to anyone without any prior appointment or formalities.
- Everyone here is expertise in their field.
Things I hate here
- After reading so many interesting things, are you still looking for it ? 😜 There’s nothing to hate here.
If you want to join the team, head to meesho.io to apply!
There’s so much more I have gained by working in this energetic team but I won’t mention due to length of this story. Also people are always supportive and eager to help. Let’s talk about Meesho as company !!
Evolution is the law of nature, nothing ever stays the same meaning nothing is permanent. That includes the monetary and shopping system of every country in the world. The way we work, how we live and literally everything we know. In tier-3 and low tier city, village, shopping experience will change and with the time, future will evolve.
Why am I so excited about this new world with Meesho, because the movement itself is more than enough to inspire you. It is called “Democratise e-commerce for everyone”.
“If I think about what I’ve done in the last 4 months, I can only imagine what will happen the next upcoming months”
Technical learning -
- Android Shortcuts — (thanks to Pranay and other SDE-I)
- Mocking api response -(thanks to Vinay)
- Crashlytics dashboard firebase
- Using debug app — api request, response, config chagnes
- Order booking from dashboard (Without QA help)
- Using Circle-CI, creating PR and resolving comments, stash/unstash changes
- Backend basic — storefront, POA, edge proxy, redis
- Jira and confluence usages
- Mesh Library — few percent
- Android release process (thanks to Rohit )
- Relearning basic — Kotlin in progress (I am trying my best to learn this quickly)
From last few months, I used to forgot things which I have learned in the past. Too bad for me !! These things are happening with me from last Nov-Dec 21. I am trying to think why this is happening with me whereas I had mastered and controlled basic coding in past.
Despite having the issue of forgetting coding, I will figure the solution of the problem. We can and should plan ahead in order to be as close to the right track as possible. I had said always that it is the curiosity maybe eagerness for me to start learning new things as early as possible. By end of year, I will be one of the best SDE-I in Meesho. If you want to help and have any suggestion which can help me to improve and achieve my goals. Please drop a comment, I am looking forward to it.
If you are like me who want to improve, brace yourself for a long run, keep patience and keep preparing yourself!
Thank you for reading. I hope you are safe and learnt something useful. Happy coding! 💻
Stay home, stay safe! 😷
