Let’s dive deeper into what makes each and every Locale family member special. Let’s hear their vision, learnings, and journey directly from them! Here’s a snippet of a short interview with our backend engineer, Vimal, who’s the reason all your data flows smoothly to Locale.ai for geospatial analytics.
When was the point you started coding and fell for backend development?
“My first memory of programming is from a BASIC class I was taught in 6th grade but it never really came up again until I was in 10th grade learning Java and then later in college I started programming as a hobby.
As far as backend development is concerned, I started out as a full-stack developer but, during all the internships I did in college I always found myself doing backend development and so, I transitioned into a backend developer.”
Three toughest challenges being a back-end developer and how did you get around solving them?
“It’s actually difficult to isolate three particular challenges that I’ve faced because even the easiest of things, like writing a GET API that fetches some data from a table seems like a daunting task early on.
Every problem has the right solution, and once you start implementing that solution, it presents its own set of problems.
Once you’ve solved enough problems or implemented different kinds of solutions you start to identify patterns and you develop an intuition that tells you how you can approach a problem and then work your way through.”
Every problem has the right solution, and once you start implementing that solution, it presents its own set of problems.
Why did you choose to work at an early stage startup like Locale and not go for traditional job options?
“Working at a startup is a different experience, you get to build something from scratch. You are more prone to making mistakes and that opens up new avenues for learning and the general environment of chaos and the will to tame that chaos is something that excites me.
I’m not saying that you might miss out on these things in a traditional job role but, I’m more well versed with a startup environment than a traditional job environment.”
There is an industry-wide debate around choosing Python vs Java vs Go. Which one do you prefer and why?
“I’m a very language agnostic person. Languages are like tools and you always have to pick the one that you’re most comfortable with and the one that solves your use case.
From my own experience, if you’re building something from scratch, you should first start out with the language that you’re comfortable with (doesn’t matter if you’re an expert), something that you’ve used before, understand the internal workings. If at some point you feel that you’ve exhausted the capabilities that the language has to offer than, you can look for a language that can enable you to solve that problem in a better way.”
If you’re building something from scratch, you should first start out with the language that you’re comfortable with (doesn’t matter if you’re an expert), something that you’ve used before, understand the internal workings.
If there was one advice you’d want to give students who aspire to be a back-end developer, what would it be?
“From what I’ve learned and this is something that I’ll do if I was in my first year of college, I would suggest that you maintain a healthy mix of theory and application. You should have a functional understanding of CS basics like operating systems, databases, networks, computer architecture, and algorithms.
You should build projects which can be an original idea but, more importantly you should spend time looking at what other people are doing, try to understand how they’ve done it, and try to implement that. Read a lot, that will keep your curiosity fuelled and never stop exploring things. Backend in itself is a very vast field and you shouldn’t worry a lot about specializing while you’re a student, so keep exploring, keep reading blogs, hacker news, be consistent with your practice and learnings.”
