Initial weeks at Gojek

My association with Gojek began from the first of July, 2020. It was a remote joining because of Covid-19. It was quite a surreal experience to start my first job with work from home. So, my room had turned into the office premise and Zoom had became an interface between me and Gojek.

The first day was all about orientation and online submission of relevant documents. There were around 40 newly hired engineers. Next day, we were introduced to Go Academy and our Pre-Bootcamp started. Go Academy is basically the talent incubator of Gojek, which introduces the newly hired engineers to Gojek’s engineering culture and equips them with relevant skills.

In each pre-bootcamp session, we learned about various aspects of how the company worked. Most of the sessions were an introduction to the various teams of Gojek, in which a senior person from the team gave a presentation about the origins of the team and how does that team operate. These sessions were quite enriching. Besides this, there were sessions on writing tips, open source introduction and clean code practice.

The term “Clean Code” was used many times in the pre-bootcamp. It’s origin is from the book of same name. It is one of the most of the recommended books for software developers. To explain it in short, this books teaches us to how to write code for others, not only for ourselves. In order to, make us implement the concepts of clean code, we were assigned a small project, which we had to execute in pair. The project was about creating two terminal applications , using Ruby and Java. The problems statements were not that complicated. The interesting part was the “Non-negotiable Etiquette List”, which had to be followed while executing the project. These etiquettes are there to ensure that all the engineers at Gojek follow a certain convention and it becomes easier for them to understand codebases written by others. One such etiquette was Test driven development, which was quite novel for me. It’s importance cannot be felt while solving simple problem statements, but while developing large scale softwares. Writing tests was a new skill which I acquired during this project.

So, this was how the first two weeks went by. Gradually, I am beginning to align my mindset with the company’s mindset. The most important takeaway for me from the sessions I have attended till now, is that as professionals we should always keep learning and upgrading our skillset. Be curious, everything else will follow.