Begining of a new journey at Gojek

I still remembered the day when I made it to Gojek (Southeast Asia Super App) after a number of online tests and interviews. Being a fresher in the corporate world I was super excited to join the company as soon as possible. So finally, I joined Gojek on 1st July 2020 but due to the pandemic, it was a virtual onboarding. Without wasting time I am going to share my first two weeks’ experience at Gojek.

On the first day, we had one Information Security session for setting up our laptops followed by the onboarding works. It was quite a long day since the documentation works always takes more time. For the next two days, we had our induction sessions followed by the introduction of the things that we were supposed to do for the next two weeks. Basically, it was the starting of our Pre-Bootcamp. Now, you might ask what actually this Pre-Bootcamp is. So, the basic definition of a Bootcamp is “an intensive military training” and from this Pre-Bootcamp is self-explanatory that it is before the actual Bootcamp.

Now, you might be confused about why Bootcamp is necessary for a software company. Since an army man also needs training before entering into the Battlefield, so the same applies to us also. As we are new to the industry, so we must know how things are working here and how could we make such things that would be beneficial to a large public. Since our main Bootcamp will be scheduled in October so, the GoAcademy team arranged a Pre-Bootcamp program where we can have a glimpse of the actual Bootcamp.

The actual journey now begins here. From the first day of the Pre-Bootcamp, we had a number of sessions regarding the introduction of all the teams that are present in Gojek, and also we had sessions that could be beneficial for our personal development. I still remembered the first session of Pre-Bootcamp where Ashray told us how to identify a Problem statement and write User stories corresponding to those problems. Now, you might ask what a User Story is. So, a user story is a problem statement given by a particular user, and corresponding to that user store there can be a number of Acceptance criteria that fulfill the requirements of that problem statement. This is very important when it comes to design a Product for a large section of people and assure that our Product would fulfill most of the requirements of those people.

We also attended a session that was focused on the Clean Code. In that session, we learned why it is important to write clean, readable, and easy to understand code. They also advised us to read the Clean Code book written by Robert C. Martin. After reading this book, I personally think that code must be clean so that it would be easy to maintain such code and it also shows that one cares about their code. I would recommend this book to anyone who really wants to gain some knowledge about the importance of clean code. In this session, we also got to know about various principles like FIRST principle for Test Driven Development, KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid), DRY(Don’t Repeat Yourself), etc.

After that, we have been assigned two projects which we had to do in two languages (Java and Ruby) and we were supposed to do the Pair Programming using TDD approach. You might ask what Pair Programming and TDD is. So, Pair programming was also a new thing for me and it basically means that you’ve been paired with someone else and both of you are supposed to do the same project by using the TDD approach. Now, TDD stands for Test Driven Development which means that you write your test first and then write the original function,i.e, your test drives your code. This was really a learning experience because I learned a lot about TDD, version control(Git), unit testing in Java, Ruby and its testing environment.

We also had several more sessions regarding the introduction of Open Source projects that are managed by Gojek and some of those projects are also used by different companies. I also want to share some of the key pointers that most people shared with us like “Always ask questions, a lot of questions because it’s the best time for you to learn” and after listening to this I remembered one of the famous lines of Steve Jobs,i.e., “Stay hungry Stay foolish”.

So at last, I want to share that it was one of the best learning experience I had and as all said that Gojek is a jungle of knowledge where you can learn a lot about the different technologies and also apply them to the real world and analyze how your learning has an impact on the huge population.