Why we launched Careem TechLOG
Drive progress in our Communities; we are blessed to have the opportunity.
~ Careem Values, Be of Service.
A community is a group of people living together and having common attributes. Here within Careem, we label communities with attributes such as culture, professional background, schools of thought, and so on. And starting with our own hometown in Karachi, a group within our engineering team came forward and created an event for our engineering community — Careem TechLOG a platform to Create, Innovate, and Communicate.
The aim of this event was to enhance the community, highlight their engineering capabilities, share knowledge, provide a learning platform, and prepare our engineers to be better prepared for an ever-changing world. We look at the problems we are facing and together, with everyone in the group, we can work to solve them. Each event is called an edition, and so far we’ve held three TechLOG editions.
“It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.”
― George Eliot
As a small first step towards this big vision, we bootstrapped TechLOG with our own team in our office. We selected one Friday as our edition day and made it happen. To keep in line with its vision, we held Slack poll a week before to decide what everyone wanted to discuss. Surprisingly, two thirds of the people who voted, wanted to hear a talk about a use-case of improving Captain earning calculation in our domain.
This use-case lies within our ride-hailing domain, and we calculate earnings and store them to be later used by some other parts of the business. In the past, this calculation had taken seconds to compute but through our work and collaboration of different iterations, today it takes just milliseconds.
In the next segment of TechLOG, we brought forward some of our senior engineers for a panel discussion.
It was aimed at Engineering’s roller-coaster ride with the growth of Careem. Many questions within the audience were raised, which mainly consisted of our application designs and historical decisions. Everyone in the room also took this time to reflect upon the journey so far, our successes and some of the key things that we’ve learned.
Next was talk — Automation, Automation, and Automation, a journey of an existing engineer at Careem. The engineer has automated a lot of the processes and hugely improved lives of other engineers he presented his little hacks and amazed the audience. Every organisation needs a guy like this — not just incredibly talented but someone who can pass on that knowledge and those skills to others in the group.
Stay humble; we have much to learn and grow
~ Careem Values, To the Moon & Beyond.
We started this event, we innovated and we communicated. We will keep doing it with bigger and better versions. We hope that this event can be a platform for everyone to discuss their solutions for various known challenges as well as being a place to discuss, innovate and share different technologies.
This is just a start, but we’re growing this and long term, perhaps it can be one of the next tech conferences in Karachi.
