This Mozilla engineer loves Flipkart’s site – and he wants to help you make one too

Photo credit: Kenny Louie.

Salvador de la Puente is a senior software engineer at Mozilla. He doesn’t claim to know much about India. “I had no idea it had that many developers,” he says when I tell him that the country will have the second highest number of developers in the world by 2020.

But he does know about Flipkart.

“I’ve heard of a few Indian companies, but one that I’m really impressed with is Flipkart,” he says. “I use its progressive web app as a case study whenever I speak on stage. It’s amazing.”

The homegrown ecommerce company decided to take its site off the web and go app-only last year. In November, it returned to the web – but this time with a different look, one that Salvador refers to as a “progressive web app”.

Known as Flipkart Lite, the new launch was a mix between the dynamism of Flipkart’s mobile app and a conventional web app. It utilizes open APIs to load faster and use less data. It even has a button to let users immediately launch the site from their home screens and sends push notifications whether a user is online or offline.

Most importantly, it lets Flipkart users look at old searches, product pages, and categories even while they’re not connected to the internet.

That’s appealing for India’s data-poor, but Salvador thinks its potential is bigger than that. “Take the example of most other websites,” he says. “If your internet is out halfway through you can’t re-watch old parts of a video, or access content you’ve already viewed – but in Flipkart, once it’s out, you can still review old products.”

Salvador’s support for progressive web apps is further validated by Mozilla’s WADI. It’s a web app developer initiative started with the goal of getting web apps working with the same efficiency and responsiveness as phone apps – despite the limitations of bad internet.

Family

There will be an estimated 5.2 million developers in India by 2018. The potential that comes with having that many skilled workers entering the economy is an exciting thought.

And yet, many of them will be working remotely for companies across the country and around the world. Without a community, that can be an isolating experience. It can also limit access to resources and collaboration – which is something about which Salvator has a lot to say.

“If a developer community is growing organically, it’s really healthy,” he says. “My biggest concern with it is: how can we give them advice to write better code? How can we create enough workshops and events to handle such big communities?”

Salvador de la Puente, Mozilla.