How does it feel to pilot a rocketship? A take on it by our first Engineer and Tech Lead
Have you ever wondered how it feels to pilot a super rocket 🚀 ?
No, I am not talking about a literal rocket. I’m talking about building the technology on which Anar stands today. At the onset, it was challenging and uncertain, but we have the thirst to elevate the networking experience of 70 million Small and Medium Businesses. And that pushes us to solve for it at a breakneck speed.
To know about the challenges and achievements first-hand, there is no better person to talk to than Himanshu Jain, our Tech lead. Everyone in the team calls him the ‘Master Jugaadu’, who emblems the saying:
‘Where there is a will, there is always a way.’
Read on to know his authentic take on it.
Being from a business family, I was well aware of the inertia faced by small business players to adopt anything online. And hence I was apprehensive about the idea. But then I met Nishank and Sanjay, our co-founders. I was particularly impressed by their will, rigour, understanding of the problem, and tenacity to solve it, and that got me on board Anar. It being a remote work made the decision making easier.
I started off setting the backend and got my hands on Ruby on Rails. After Abhishek (our Backend engineer) got on board to steer our backend, I took to Frontend development on React Native framework. React native was the obvious choice for its flexibility, compactness, server-side rendering capability, and community support. Shortly after, we released the first version of our app in Feb 2020 and iterated at a blazing speed to grow to what it is today.
It has surely been one hell of a journey, with a steep learning curve📈. Imagine! For the first 2 lakh users, Anar was solely built by a team of three engineers. To add to it, two developers, Sumit and I, learned React Native from scratch on the go. Despite that, we have been executing and delivering right from Day 1.
Sanjay has built an incredible result-driven work culture in the tech team from the very inception. Here at Anar, we solve real-life problems, rather than performing monotonous and routine tasks every day.
I can give multiple examples that highlight how this fosters innovation in the solution. At one particular instance, we wanted to give our users the capability to chat with others. We tried multiple chat SDKs such as Sendbird and Applozic. However, due to user privacy issues, we decided to build an in-house chat system, to prevent the messages being sent to and stored with a third party application.
We started exploring building a real-time chat system with Elixir and Phoenix. But adopting this approach added to the complexity of the app and led to a marked performance drop due to open connections.
The tech and the product team sat down together to tackle the challenge, we had a profound realization that we don’t need chat per se. We rather needed a basic technology with a similar functionality such as that of the SMS, which did not have to be in real-time. Just looking at the same problem from a different perspective led us to a more efficient and effective solution, which we managed to deliver in less than a week.
“ It is not always about diving into complex solutions, the best solutions are often simpler ones looked at from a different perspective. ”
Our chat is completely integrated, such that it can be accessed from multiple source points and can also give access to multiple endpoints. It isn’t just a simple peer-to-peer communication consisting of text and images. We enabled actions such as:
- sharing the collection and product
- ordering a product
- requesting a review
- posting requirements
right from within the chat by custom cards. This robust chat system has been highly appreciated by all our users, to the extent that more than 50% of our daily active business users use chat everyday.
Fast forward a year and a half, I have seen Anar scale tremendously with some commendable achievements -10K+ product uploads a day, 40k+ connection requests a day, 400k+ product views a day. What hasn’t changed is the vigour and sense of ownership I feel towards the work I take up. In fact, taking complete ownership is the core cultural value of Anar and this is something that I completely embrace.
Are you looking to join a dynamic group of engineers obsessed with scaling up? We are hiring!
About Anar Business App:
Anar is a business networking platform for 70 million SMBs in India with over 200k+ registered businesses who are using it regularly to grow their network, exposure, knowledge and business.
Anar is open for manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, retailers and resellers across India and works especially well for businesses in the clothing, apparels, textiles and gems & jewellery sectors.
