My Internship Experience at Rapido: Jenish Jain
A little bit about myself
I am an Electrical Engineer by my majors; I used to work previously as a freelance where I was developing IoT products. I am presently working as an Associate Product Engineer at Rapido. In this blog, I would be sharing my experience as an intern at Rapido.
My internship journey
First of all, you would be curious about how did an electrical engineer land a job as an Associate product developer at one of India’s hottest startup, but I am aiming to cover that as in a separate blog.
As the first days are always special at an organization, mine was too. All pumped up and excited; I was at Rapdio’s operations office at around 8:30 am, where I got my intern ID, work machine, and a brief induction about our company. After my orientation, the team asked me to move to our other office where the whole tech team works (the place where the magic of turning ideas to product happens.)
I was assigned under the pricing team, where we are responsible for all the numbers/estimates that you see while you book a ride right from the ride amount to offers to your insurance we got it all covered. On my first day itself, my manager told me:
Do not consider youself as an intern, consider yourself an equally contributing team member and get comfortable with our codebase in the next 2–3 days and start contributing to it.
Tasks on which I worked on during the Internship
1.Migration of an old collection to a new database
During my first task, I took two days to write the script and guess who ran the script on production (with fears and hesitation, of course, hoping not to screw anything as it was my first week still! but it went fine).
2.Developing a caching service to provide distance-time metrics for any rides estimation
This was my first big project where I developed a caching service (along with my colleague), which was used to offer distance-time metrics to any rides estimation.
3. Gamifying our captain’s app platform
I have worked on this another engaging feature to increase our captain’s platform engagement and ensure the availability of more captains for our requesting users.
These are just a few of the highlights, but there were plenty more.
With every task, I got to know the complexities of our system which seemed pretty simple initially, and thus I learned even more. To accumulate my learnings, I have worked on three different languages(Java, Javascript, Golang), frontend framework like AngularJS, numerous databases, using monitoring tools like Grafana and Kibana and the steps to write unit test cases (still learning this).
The thing I like here at Rapido is that everyone treats you equally, there are certain restrictions on access only until you explain the use-case which is not based on hierarchy.
My first individual feature
While I was working as an intern I thought I would always work in teams or pairs, but very soon I was asked to work on a feature on my own, this is where I got to learn about sorting requirements with the stakeholders, resolve dependencies, schedule and drive meetings which might not seem to be a big of a task but it was. So the feature was to allow users to make partial payments, i.e., if the user does not have the entire ride amount available in his wallet, he can pay the rest of the amount with cash.
Apart from the calculations, I had to figure out how offers and recommendations would behave with the change of flow and how to acknowledge users. It was pretty exciting to see how even a small change in API contract needs to be discussed across multiple teams to make the flow work. So, the next time you make partial payments in Rapido, remember that an intern made it.
Do we always work?
Not exactly! Between all the learnings, there were many fun moments, which include occasional team lunches and regular tea time breaks, which are even continued virtually during this pandemic (where talking about work and code is not considered ethical).
Fast-forwarding it to today, I am currently placed at Rapido and working here as an associate product engineer, still learning and contributing every day.
Also, we’re are always looking out for passionate individuals to join our team. Feel free to reach out to jenish.jain@rapido.bike if you want to chat about an open position available on www.rapido.bike/Careers or seeking for a referral.
