Back in late Janurary, I joined a new company, Druva. They do really fancy stuff with enterprize backup and data-protection. They are mostly on top of AWS, with a couple of on-prem solutions as well. I have joined as a software engineer in the Druva Labs team. This team focuses on building early versions of new products that the company can offer.

The Opportunity

In November, a friend I met on a trek back in 2018 called me up asking if I was looking for a role as a developer. He was looking to hire someone for his team. I wasn't thinking about switching just yet, but I did want to move into a developer role, especially one that focused on writing things for the cloud.

As I grew in my DevOps role, I came across a bunch of fancy devops tools that were amazing pieces of technology in their own right and I sort of fell in love with the idea of writing these tools. More than that, I really liked the idea of solving massive engineering challenges as opposed to merely using anything that AWS provides. The dream job would be to work at one of these SaaS companies.

So, when this opportunity presented itself, I couldn't let go. I was a bit scared about the interview as I had not prepared for any interview in a long-time, let alone a developer for a "development" role.

The Interview

There were 3 rounds of interview. One of them was extremely technical and it focused mainly on Data-Structures and Algorithms. I was very upfront about my skill-set in this domain, which meant that I didn't know any GoLang whatsoever. I could read and understand very simple GoLang. Fortunately, they were not too picky about it and were very understanding. In the technical interview also, they didnt make me write any program. I was asked to solve a problem by designing an algorithm and then optimize it to fit a certain time-complexity. I found this task slightly difficult as the last time I looked at Algorithms and Optimizations was in late 2018. I was surprized that I even remembered time-complexity. I did not expect this type of interview, however it was extremely fun. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge.

I could not prepare heavily for the interview because the time frame in which this happened was too short. All the interviews were scheduled and completed in about 3 weeks. My friend told me that they wanted to fill the position really fast so I guess that had a part to play in it. Also, this was a particularly stressful time at Shaadi because I had to train the newly joined member of the DevOps team (who I interviewed) and we were also migrating a very important workload to ECS during that time.

Finally they decided to extend an offer to me, and it was good enough that I didn't bother countering it. I was just excited that I managed to clear the interviews and was going to be working with such a team.

Joining and stuff

Leaving shaddi was quite painful. The projects I was working on needed some active babysitting before hading them off to someone else. My manager asked me to stay on more than the 30-day notice just in-case the project didn't finish in time. I expected this and I was quite happy to do it. In the end, the project got over spectacularly and I said goodbye to shaadi for good.

As the lockdown was on getting the laptop and ob-boarding etc were difficult. The on-boarding was fully on-line and the laptop arrived about a week later. I had to ship my work laptop from Shaadi too.

So far, Druva has been like a dream come true. The work is exciting and I am surrounded by extremely talented engineers around me. I am still learning things and this had to be the steepest learning curve I have ever faced in my career. The first three weeks at Shaadi used to be this steep!! Its Amazing! It's a bit stressful, but I am learning a LOT!!

Thats it for this time.