I remember being in my third year of B Tech and being constantly anxious about placements. Back then, I was studying Computer Science at BPPIMT Kolkata. I remember applying for companies and not hearing back and feeling dejected. It was a very low point in my life. So many things have happened since then. Including Wingify.
Tomorrow (At the time of writing) marks the end of my Internship at Wingify to transition into a full-time employee \(^o^)/ . Hi, I’m Kritidipto Ghosh, and here is a summary of what the last 4 months at Wingify have been like.
My Initial Weeks
The first few days at Wingify were amazing ……….. and intimidating. My team members, reporting manager, and colleagues were all super nice and welcoming. But when I first saw the codebase I was completely clueless. It was a very large codebase with complicated architecture and I wondered whether I would even be able to contribute. I was assigned to the Campaign Editor team reporting to Gautam Paul. Gautam was very helpful. For the first 2 weeks, I was given time to explore the codebase and play around with the operations. One of the things that greatly helped me was having 2 more interns on our team who were exactly in the same boat as me. Arshansh and Vikash. We three used to sit together and discuss things that we found confusing . Shubham and Harshit were the senior devs in our team. They went out of their way and helped us, taking time out of their busy schedules.
Challenges and learning
One of the many positives of working in a fast-paced product-based company is that you get to learn a lot. One of the first challenges I faced was getting to even run the code on my local. Since everyone else used either Mac or Windows and I was the only one on a Linux system, it was a rather hard thing for me to configure everything and ensure all the scripts ran properly. I remember spending two days over a silly problem with node(Nodejs) version, scrambling through stack overflow, and then realizing users(including sudo) in linux don’t share the same node. The next time I had the same exact problem with SSH keys, but I knew how to solve it because of my previous learnings. Eventually, with facing problems constantly, I got better at debugging, understood version control, got more comfortable following code flows, and overall started getting a hang of the codebase(kinda). It was the constant stream of problems that forced me to learn these things.
What I Loved
- One of the best things about Wingify is the company culture. Everyone is very transparent and there is zero politics. It’s all about good quality work. We have something called “Wingify Camp” that happens every month, where our CEO, Sparsh Gupta gives company-wide updates about the different departments. In the camp, he responds to comments/questions/criticisms that are made anonymously by employees. This is a great system that ensures transparency and keeps the employees in the loop, which is especially important in a remote environment.
- There is absolutely no micro-management here. We are given a lot of freedom in the way we work and generally, there are no hard deadlines that you absolutely have to adhere to. This allows you to work at your pace and in turn bring the best possible value to the team.
- The people working here are all hard-working ambitious people who are constantly looking for new things to learn. In our team, we often had chit-chat sessions about javascript with Gautam . He used to share a lot of interesting questions and we used to have very interesting conversations about the “Weird” nature of javascript. He often shares tech articles and encourages us to take up learning new tech stacks to expand our horizons. There are a lot of really competent people working here, who know their stuff really well and are willing to share their knowledge with you.
- One of the problems of working in a remote environment is you can start feeling isolated after a while. Wingify does a great job of mitigating that problem. We have frequent meet-ups and fun parties and outings. Due to the covid problem, the outings weren’t possible, but we recently had a party in Delhi that I attended. It was amazing to see the actual people behind the slack profile pictures with whom I spend so much time. Also, I would like to mention Namrata Kannoujia, Associate Manager HR, who keeps coming up with interesting and engaging activities and events to make our Remote Weekdays a bit more interesting and exciting.
So, this has been my amazing journey as a SE intern at Wingify. With tomorrow marking the end of it . I am really grateful that the company took a chance on a clueless 20-something-year-old fresher and I hope to be able to keep contributing, growing, and learning.
Happy Wingifighting !!!!
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