First Week at Joveo
Joveo. A small team of high performing individuals, working towards a common goal — “A job for everyone”.
I joined Joveo’s new office which had been inaugurated a week back. The developer’s floor is a silent one by design which has an array of developers working together. You can hear Jahangir’s hushes periodically when a group starts making noise.
My first day at Joveo was an exciting one. I got a new MSI Leopard, of my own choice (thanks Suvarchala!), the only Windows laptop in a sea of Apple MacBooks. Yes, we do love Apple here. Somehow, it felt like I have always belonged here, and the new-company-how-will-I-fit jitters were put to rest.
The next day was Friday and Joveo has seriously the best Friday after-office fun! :D
We had a Pictionary competition. A lot of us were not paying attention during the rules explanation, being the rebellious lot that we are. I have never had so much fun playing Pictionary, especially when the entire focus is on distracting the other team’s player. Later on, a penalty system was put up for this, but we found workarounds. We decided on a tie for both teams, amidst a news channel-like debate. The next day we had a meme competition, in the middle of a workday, and everyone posted the funniest memes.
“@mittal it feels like you’ve always been around :) Here’s to more Pictionary, Dumb Charades & Great teamwork” — Sarada
The founding team is a big fan of the Lord of the Rings since all the internal naming convention for repositories based on LOTR characters. Benedict Cumberbatch will be amused to see Smaug being the Database Connector and not the fire-breathing dragon he voiced.
The work culture at Joveo is an interesting one -
> Everyone is trusted to spend their time as they see fit. You are responsible for your commitments and do not have someone micromanaging you. In a nutshell, everyone who works here loves the work they do.
> You are free to approach anyone if you need help, without jumping through the hoops of bureaucracy. The primary focus of each individual is to contribute as per his/her best ability.
> In contrast to the traditional approach of Peter Principle (Job Position ∝ Years of Experience), a lot of the senior developers choose to be individual contributors instead of heading up teams, because they can contribute more this way.
I am glad to have Bhargav as my mentor, who helped through the code walkthroughs. We have interesting problems to solve at scale. Currently, Scala is used predominantly as the back-end language with glimpses of Java and Python as well. The cloud stack is AWS-based while MongoDB (NoSQL), Redis (Cache) and SQL serve our database needs. Most of the front-end is in Angular. Besides these, we use a layer of services, tools, frameworks, and technologies to handle our requirements.
To conclude, I love the fact that doing innovative stuff is an integral part of our product culture. I have always believed in the philosophy of “work hard, play hard”. It makes me so happy to see when your work-place inspires innovation and creativity and gives you the freedom to work as you see fit. A mix of these factors is what makes a company — a family! :)
Until next time,
Aditya Mittal
