People of OST: Alpesh Modi, Lead Software Engineer
Alpesh is a lead back-end engineer and an incredible solution generator with expertise in Ruby on Rails. He is a hands-on programmer with deep technical expertise and has great knowledge on software architecture and implementation.
Tell us about yourself!
I have been working in Pune for about 11 years. I was born and brought up in a small city called Palanpur, in northern Gujarat, India. I completed my computer science degree from C. K. Pithawala College of Engineering and Technology. After graduation, I started my career in Mumbai at Pinstorm. After working at Pinstorm for a year, I moved to Pune where I started working on Social Median, Fab, and Pepo with Nishith and Sunil. Apart from work, I love solving different puzzles such as sudoku. I have about 250 puzzles that I’ve worked on.
What excites you about blockchain?
Sometime in 2012, we had a hackathon at Fab and one of our team members built a project around bitcoin and blockchain. This is when I first heard about blockchain and I didn’t understand it much. I began to learn a little bit more about it as it gained traction. Over the past couple of years, there has been lots of development and improvements to blockchain technologies. I never thought that I’ll be working on blockchain technologies. While working at Pepo, we were trying to find a way to incentivize users, increased retention, and encourage user interactions. While we were experimenting with different solutions, we realized that we could build something with blockchain technology that can help others with user engagement and retention. Blockchain excites me because it’s interoperable, transparent, and immutable, removing the need for a trusted third party.
What does your role as a Senior Software Engineer at OST entail?
As I previously mentioned my interest for puzzle solving, I really like hands-on coding. The team and I work on different streams such as OST Platform, APIs, SDKs, and OST VIEW. I am involved with coding requirement analysis in terms of implementation. We engage in discussions to find out the best possible solutions to solve our business requirements. We write usable, secure, and horizontally scalable code so that we can support any new requirements in the future. Along with hands on coding. I am also involved in code reviews to ensure the code aligns with our requirements.
I also move into different work streams when required, depending upon priority. Very recently, I worked on VIEW and the Ruby SDK. We have a few upcoming features that we will release such as stable coin staking.
What do you look forward to this year?
I’ll just rephrase what Jason says “it’s just the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of the beginning.” I have been working with Sunil and Jason for more than 10 years and I know that they are the best. I have no doubt about what they have planned because I’m sure that whatever they’re doing, it is definitely very well thought out. I personally really love the project idea and I see a bright future for OST and blockchain technologies. Five years ago I was just learning about blockchain for the first time and today I am working on blockchain technology. Five years from now, there will be a lot more people that understand this technology and I’m sure it will be well developed in the future. I’m excited to see improvements, work on new solutions, and overcome challenges over the next couple of years as we scale and grow OST.
Thank you, Alpesh!
Be sure to check out last week’s interview with OST senior software engineer Ankit Singh. Subscribe to our YouTube channel or listen to the audio format anywhere you listen to podcasts, including iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. We’re also now available on Alexa! Simply add “OST LIVE” to your flash briefing.
About OST
OST powers the future of brand loyalty. Innovators use OST Platform to reward behaviours and increase engagement with Brand Currency. It’s a complete set of developer tools that any company can integrate without any in-house blockchain expertise. OST partners reach more than 300 million end-users and we will be rolling out live implementations throughout 2019. OST currently has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune, and is expanding to other markets. OST is backed by leading institutional equity investors including Tencent, Greycroft, Vectr Ventures and 500 Startups.
