My Journey as a Developer at SV.CO
I just returned home from a week long trip to Silicon Valley, USA as part of the SV.CO #StartInCollege programme which my team and me joined in January 2017. I am now a Startup Engineer at SV.CO and here is my journey.
BACKGROUND
I am Abel Kuruvilla Santosh, a final year computer science engineering student from NSS Palakkad in Kerala. I was just another geek who was keen on learning all the different areas in the field of computer science engineering . I started with Cyber Security, then tried Game Development and Android Development, Web development, etc. with no point of focus.
That was me in my pre final year of engineering lost somewhere in my own code. I decided to use my skills to Code for a Purpose.
Yes, I wanted to Code for a Purpose. I wanted to build something which could solve a problem and get some feedback on what I wanted to build and not live in my own bias.
Here is how things changed in my developer life
If you know the destination, you can adjust the sails in the right direction.
THE PROGRAM
My friends and me decided to build a campus startup. We joined SV.CO StartInCollege program where they help us build a startup through their program. The program had Office Hours ( one on one sessions with industry developers), Developer circles on slack, Events to showcase products in front of CTO’s and CEO’s of startups and more.
Check the tour of SV.CO here https://www.sv.co/tour
Don’t be scared, you can join as an amateur developer and keep learning as you proceed in the program. The beauty of the program is there are no shortcuts and you have to be good at the game.
The Journey from College Hostel to Silicon Valley
That is my team and me in our college hostel. That room is where we nurtured our programming skills and had sleepless nights coding. 6 months later I had a chance to visit Silicon Valley and experienced life of a valley based entrepreneur. Trust me The Silicon Valley show made more sense than ever before :D
CHECKPOINT 1: Meeting my Mentor and Learning about technology startups
Well, I was lucky to meet this gentleman in my college life. He is Vishnu Gopal, the CTO of SV.CO and one of the founding developers at Slideshare. Vishnu Gopal helped me understand what it meant to develop a Product against competitive programming. Instead of doing multiple small coding sprints, I learnt the importance to conceptualise an idea, create an functional MVP, find users and then scale. As a developer, I was figuring out a purpose for my skills.
Office Hours taught me about Tech stacks
Office hours (one on one session on a specific topic) with Vishnu helped me understand the technical mistakes I made on choosing the initial Tech Stack for my product (like choosing a major framework for development rather than micro-frameworks). Office hours with Sanjay Vijayakumar (Chairman, SV.CO) helped me understand the customer point of view for a product , and their expectations.
Famous Developers and Product managers were our teachers
Being an Engineer guy, I was more interested in Technical sessions rather than the marketing sessions, though I did engage in such sessions too :D
The live sessions by Ajay Srivatsava (ex CTO of OYO), Tanmai Gopal (Founder of Hasura), Hari Gopal (Lead- engineering at SV.CO) and other engineers from startup ecosystem helped me learn industry level practices for building products and learnt some new testing tools they used for developing their products. Until then, I used to simply code, didn’t do much of a tester’s job.
To do targets improved me as a Developer
One of the main targets (To do tasks) that helped me improve was getting feedback of our product from batch teammates and senior Alumni. They helped me understand the faults I made in engineering, and how to rectify them. Even looking at someone else’ work helped me see a new way of programming.
Check point 2: My FIRST Product was ready
My team and me built Skhedule.me which will be your perfect guide to help you manage your events and meetings hassle free.
Learn coding languages by building a product
On my journey through SV.CO, I learned quite a few programming languages and Frameworks. Some of them are MeteorJS, ReactJS, ReactNative, Android Java and MongoDB.
Peer developers at SV.CO helped me in Google Foobar Challenge
My friends from SV.CO had always been a helping hand for me. A most recent example would be, Vignesh and Ajo helping me out with my Google Foobar Challenge. If I have any doubts, or if I need any help for any engineering task (or even non-engineering tasks), I can contact any one of my colleagues in an instant, and they would be most supportive of me.
Checkpoint 3: Working in a team makes you a better developer
As a developer, finding customers for the product is a tough task for me. That is why building a startup is a team thing and cannot be done alone. Developers need help to find users to improve the product.That is why working as a team was the best thing in college.
My team and me had spent sleepless nights sending cold emails, talking with people to use our product. We were losing hope on our product and thought this might not work. Just then we attended Customer Insights day at SV.CO and got some great feedback from experts from Facebook and Hasura.
We immediately went home and started improving our product to make it ready for the dream trip our team has been awaiting.
For me, building a startup is like an F1 race. You have pitstops to refuel your engine and change tyres but not to quit. Events at Sv.CO were such pitstops before the Silicon valley trip.
CheckPoint 4: Travelling to Silicon Valley
This is a life changing experience for any developer on this planet. I got to meet amazing developers, people, founders right at the mecca of startups. If given a chance, I would go back and spend a week at 42 Silicon Valley, a coding school in San Francisco. I would never have dreamt to be at Google, Facebook without SV.CO introducing me to this world.
Every student developer get a reality check when you are in Silicon Valley. It will motivate you to innovate and code for a purpose and not just get stuck in the rat race of programming.
This is just the beginning. The best is yet to come
After SV.CO, I identified myself to be a Research and Developmental guy. I research on various engineering fields and try to develop a product on its basis. Recently I am experimenting with Hyperledger Blockchain and IoT networks and hope to create a new product in those fields
