Tech Reward and Recognition — Jan’23

CARS24 recognizes the value of its employees and provides a range of reward and recognition programs to motivate and retain them. These programs include competitive compensation, employee stock ownership plans, recognition programs, training and development, and employee referral programs. These programs help create a positive work environment, boost employee morale and motivation, and ensure company success.

This month’s rewards were from 2 significant categories Innovator of the Month and Extra Miler award.

INNOVATOR OF THE MONTH

The award is given monthly and is intended to showcase and celebrate individuals or teams who have demonstrated exceptional creativity, problem-solving skills, and an ability to think outside the box.

Keerthan Nandigama (ReactNative Developer):

Problem Faced — Rendering long form causing performance issues.

Solution — He refactored the screen and moved the control to screen level rather than global. Used memoization to reduce the re-renders & kept the definitions to the minimum, thereby increasing the performance to ~40%.

In his own words

Getting recognized for delivering quality outcomes does feel good and acts as a check that I’m on the right path and also motivates to do better.

Innovator of The Month Award — Keerthan Nandigama (React Native Developer)

Monish Sharma (React Developer):

Problem Faced — Sharing code across multiple disparate projects at scale can be problematic for many organizations. The challenge is to eliminate code duplication and create a more shareable environment that saves time for the developers.

Problem Solution (POC on NX workspace) — He did a POC on NX workspace. Nx is a modular build framework for architecting and maintaining code projects. A monorepo is a version-controlled code repository that holds many projects; they are often logically independent and run by different teams. The other benefit of standardizing libraries is code sharing b/w different repositories irrespective of which stack you are using; we need to add a shareable libs directory and import any on the repo present inside a monorepo.

In his own words

These extra efforts make me stand out from the crowd and people get to know you, the work you are doing.

Innovator of The Month Award — Monish Sharma (React Developer)

EXTRA MILER

Extra Miler Award is given to individuals or teams who have delivered a groundbreaking solution, solved a complex technical challenge, provided excellent customer service, or contributed significantly to developing a new technology or product.

Anurag Thakur (React Developer)

Problems Faced — Our site performance score was low, and did not pass the Core Web Vitals. In our UAE project, dead code and different version of the same components were there. There were a lot of APIs and user-related issues were there in our monitoring system.

Solutions — Apart from sprint tasks, I have done the following work for performance improvements, code cleaning, and bug fixes related to sentry and datadog.

Results:
1. Before these changes, our LCP score was high, and for users with good core web vitals, LCP was below 50%. After our changes, it has crossed the 75% mark now.

2. Homepage Performance for CLS — Before these changes, we had a lot of layout shifts related to the font and min-height of the components because the content was dynamically coming, especially for iPad devices

In his own words:

This is the best thing in Cars24 if you do something different and show the management your efforts they always recognize them and when you get an award for them it boosts your morale and confidence.

Extra Miler Award — Anurag Thakur (React Developer)

Ayushi Srivastava (Backend Developer — Java)

Problem Faced — Working for the past 4–5 months in UAE Dealer project, there was a requirement for showing the Car Conditions Summary as an image, such that any damaged/Repainted car part was supposed to be indicated as a different color to have a visual indication of the car part.

The problem was finding a way to do this in Java with minimal Image Processing and Image Segmentation without significantly increasing server load.

What solution you proposed

After spending some time on POC around this, she successfully replaced the color of a primary image (not the car skeleton) in good time complexity and CPU utilization. Later, this was applied to a pre-colored car skeleton image with 13 different colored segments.

The next set of challenges faced was the segment border pixels colors as the RGB values for the 13 colors got mixed with black converting into shades of black of the original 13 colors. A range of RGB values of +-11 was applied to overcome this issue.

In her own words

It feels encouraging, appreciated and gratified to be recognised for the amount of effort placed. A big thanks to the leadership for this great initiative. I am grateful to have such great management and peers and their constant support and guidance.

Personally, it is great to work on complex problems and come up with a solution and be recognised for it. There were a whole set of learnings for this problem, namely, patience, diligence and many more. I was able to push a lot for this as this was something I enjoyed solving. At the end of the day, it is problems like these that help raise performance bars for an individual.

Extra Miler Award — Ayushi Srivastava (Backend Developer)