A software developer’s diary and what each week taught him about startup life

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An average person speaks 15,000 words a day, but I am willing to bet that we developers are a less chatty bunch. We prefer to let our code do the talking.

But this time around, let me break the rules and talk about why I love being a programmer at a startup.

I first heard of Playment, a startup mobile crowdsourcing platform that outsources large-scale data operations to workers or “players,” through HackerEarth. I was working for a travel company at the time and was itching for a more challenging role.

In a company with 70 or more developers, I spent a lot of time waiting for work to trickle down to me. And a lot of the work was repetitive, like changing the look and feel of UI. I needed a change. I wanted to work in a setup where there was greater scope to use business logic, algorithms, and less CRUD. I wanted to be hands-on and tinker with the innards of a live application. And I needed mentors who would trust me enough to let me make my own mistakes.

So when an offer from a startup came along, I jumped right on board.

And it has been one heck of a ride ever since. At a startup, there really is a new challenge facing you every week and sometimes every day.

Week 2

Just nine days since I joined Playment, we hit a snag. Our client base was growing and there were more workers signing up to use our app. There was a need to rapidly scale our backend resources to keep pace with business.

We thought to redesign the architecture so we could assign more tasks to more users. When Himanshu, our CTO, and I took stock, we found that requests were timing out because our database was not able to handle the number of concurrent reads and writes. As we go through the code, I began to understand the architecture of our codebase in depth.

We concluded that introducing Redis into our system would be the most viable solution going forward. When it came to implementation, Himanshu suggested we pair program. He would go first to explain what he was doing, and if something was unclear, I’d stop him to ask questions. Then, it would be my turn.

Coding while he watched was nerve-racking at first, but I got used to it. He was helpful and patient, fixing my errors, teaching me handy shortcuts, and I learned a lot about writing less-complicated, test-friendly robust code.

One benefit of working for a startup is the hands-on treatment. I never would have gotten the chance to code with the CTO of a larger company.

Week 6 

I was called in to analyze and tweak the production SQL database for performance and tasked to set up a new master-slave configuration so our analysts could run a heavier load of queries.

This meant I had to set up a replica database, which improved the security of the data by allowing all analysts to use the replica for their data requirements rather than the production database itself, making the data more secure and accessible.

Week 12 

Week 26 

A year in 

Advice for young developers

A caveat