Understanding life via Bootcamp

Abhinav Rai
Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read

I did my 2017 summer intern at Go-Jek and since then, the mystery of bootcamp has always fascinated me. Joining as product engineer this July, the bootcamp journey so far has been imperative in realizing us the importance of coding practices and consequences of writing bad code.

The common mis-conception which I had before joining was that we would be taught frameworks, languages and tech-stack of Go-Jek. But such things can be easily learnt on our own and the focus here is to discipline us with etiquettes and principles of coding. Things which are difficult to learn on your own!

The code we write is the result of our thoughts and perceived ideologies about life. There are many dogmas in our head which subconsciously result in shit code. A major focus is given on shaping & expanding this outlook by debates and discussions.

So what did we learn in the last 3 weeks of the bootcamp?

Never love your code

Disclaimer: Smoking in injurious to health

We have this innate tendency to love what we build. This is what makes us blinded to hear about its flaws and discuss its improvements.

You only lose what you cling to — Buddha

The way its done in the bootcamp is by this might rm -rf. Any mistake in following the coding etiquette results in doing a self rm — rf to the code. No attachment with the code needed.

VLCC Model

Before and After

Always think of this before after model before any task. Our general philosophy is to start the task and finish it first. But we often forget what will we actually get after doing the task. Quite a lot of times our effort goes waste because the after product was not required!

Saying what you mean

One of the problematic jobs is to make the other person understand what you have in your head. Most of the companies lose a lot because one person could not communicate what he had in his mind. Now this thought of ours passes through a lossy convertor and a serializer and then the other person does the same in reverse order. Each step has a loss. What we need to do is to minimize this loss. We have our speaking sessions everyday designed to rectify this problem.

Abhinav Rai

Written by

Product Engineer at Go-Jek | Guitarist | Traveller | Entrepreneur

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