Four months in a fast-growing startup
Everybody lately talks about startups. I had such a almost-surreal opportunity this year to work in a great startup environment! The possibilities to work in a fast growing startup environment during a lifetime is 1/100000. So, if you consider yourself a “normal” person, you don’t fucking read on!
General Four months ago, on May 28, I began working at Warply. A startup in Greece which tons of fun things going on, as well as serious business. I knew the company before, I had heard many awesome things but never thought one day I’d be a member of the team. Working on a large-scale project that reaches millions of people every day has been huge for me. Considering that this is the first, so serious project I’ve been working on, that’s absolutely marvellous. It was a totally new concept, on an enterprise level. Especially in a startup company, you work on a task at hand. You get to talk about it to other people, you become a little part of something rock-star big that you are enthusiastic about. The company was going quite great. The initial product was finally developed and there were already big clients calling for support. It was growing also. It was growing impressively fast, Warply was blasting! A couple of months later we are almost double the amount, as new people joined the A-team! A while after I got onboard, it was the period when our main back-end technology had to be redesigned and optimized, also making use of cutting edge technology. For example, we needed to implement a SAP HANA architecture to perform faster and offer real-time results to our customers.
The experience
Working in a startup is not only about the job, it’s a life experience. During the last four months, my skills were jetpack-boosted!
Coming from the engineering side, I am very much a pragmatist about this, by the time the majority of my time is spent on shipping a kicking-ass product and the systems to support shipping it smoothly. I got to write code much more efficiently than I did till now, I learned new techniques and methods and called to solve various perplexed technical issues. The company has also invested in tools — mostly fab and recipes on cuisine — yes, we are a python shop, so that developers deploy software in multiple production server with 1-click. I extended those tools and based on business metrics and automated-tests, code I wrote reached millions of users in real-time. I was encouraged to “move fast and break things” (considering I knew how to fix them). As the company kept growing, I had the chance to get my hands dirty with bleeding-edge cloud technology and administrate those services. ‘Cause of the high-demand of services we offer, we created a powerful distributed architecture running on Microsoft Azure and used plenty of cutting-edge features like Azure Redis Cache, Traffic Manager and Azure Blob Storage. The toolset included a polyglot paradime varying from NoSQL to GEO, Graph and SQL databases going down to mobile SDKs that power up millions of devices. You will never deeply understand this feeling, except you have a technical background and you’ve already worked at a startup.
Never anybody can tell anyone else that working at a fast growing environment is as easy as a corporate job could be. But the transition from a small company with a good product to a kicking-ass company is absolutely worth it. Many people ask me how am I dealing with this, considering my age and the life of a “normal” 20 years old youth that has nothing to do with any of this stuff, “do you like it?”. “Hell yeah!” is my answer before you even finish your sentence. PS: Warply is a mobile marketing toolbox that powers up monetization, loyalty and engagement.
This post was originally posted here
