(NOTE: This was written back in Oct 2024! A lot has happened since then – something I’ll probably write about sometime later)

A UK based organisation, a Slack channel with British folks around, we use Python, and I had just been introduced. I couldn’t resist.

However, that was the beginning of my realization that things were going to be different this time around.

No one seemed to have got the joke.

I was embarrassed beyond words then. I was gracefully advised about how that specific Slack channel was used for important announcements and success stories only. I sat in front of my screen with a very weird feeling. The “first impression is the best impression” was lurking around somewhere in my head poking me and making me imagine how the entire year is going to be from that moment onwards. In retrospect, that imagination wasn’t completely wrong.

The saving grace was Luke Reader. I breathed a sigh of relief and I regained my composure once he replied talking about the health of his Parrot. I had an exchange with him and he knew exactly what he was doing with his reply. He left the organisation recently and I’ll be forever in his debt. I couldn’t thank him enough.

Thus started my journey.

Getting the Job

• Leaving Able:

I had left Able on the 31st of May 2023 after an exact 3 year stint. Those 3 years were the most challenging & humbling time of my life. More from a personal perspective than a career one. Now that I think about it, the WordPress editor screwing me out of the blog post I had composed as a reflection of the work & life during that time – sitting at a stretch for 3 days nonetheless – was for the best. I was brought in as a Lead Python developer who took up Ruby during the final year because of the circumstances dictating it. If it weren’t for both Arpan & Madhu on the career side of things, I don’t want to imagine how my life would’ve turned out to be.

While thinking about my next adventure, in a moment of coincidence, I heard about Travelopia both from my brother as well as Vamsee. Having worked as Web Backend Engineer, the JD didn’t seem to fit.

• Seeking (and the failed interviews):

I reached out to a few folks amidst which I decided to apply for a few interviews directly as well. I had never given an “official” interview before and a part of me wanted to see what would happen there. Long story short, I didn’t clear any of them.

I’ll probably write about my thoughts around it in a later blog post, but the tension I had was unreal. I had to sell myself – my experience, my principles, my worth – in the span of roughly an hour where I was trying to solve a problem for the sake of solving the problem.

Outside of that, I had conversations with a few out of which we decided to mutually part ways except for 2.

In the midst of all of this, as much as I felt to not be a perfect fit, Vamsee had convinced me to quit judging myself too much and just get on with the programme. Hence the conversations with Travelopia had started.

• The talks, the offer letter, and the postponing

There were a few rounds of conversations with multiple people. It was a roller coaster then itself and my lack of experience dealing with larger companies and their processes really was exposed. “Salary slips” was something completely new to me. That should be probably convey the idea enough and how patient the HR folks had to be with me. I was frustrated with the time the process took that I finally lost my cool – something that I learnt to be never a good thing – to which I apologised for.

I flew to Bangalore on a Friday to meet with both Venky and Sree. We had a nice chat sitting on the rooftop terrace. I declined to have the office tea wherein Venky convinced me to open up to new experiences. I obliged and I enjoyed the tea. Him recommending “Catcher in the Rye” was the highlight of the meeting (of course, apart from presenting me with a t-shirt after our chat, making their intent explicit).

There were quite a few other gems hidden within that conversation too – thoughts & insights into being a “programmer” as opposed to being a “python programmer”. How the titles of “junior” / “senior” when it comes to “Engineers solving a problem” have brought about an unnecessary bias in terms of decision making. A few examples that Sree mentioned in terms of noticing the scope of certain projects and how he had to make hard choices around them, etc. In short, I walked away a smarter man.

They sent me the offer letter with the date of joining as 28th of August. An hour before receiving the offer letter on 16th of August, I tweaked my ankle and got a bone fracture just under my left leg’s little toe. I communicated, they understood and the date was moved to September 11th.

The Job

The formal title was “Tech Lead – Data Engineering”. As I mentioned earlier, I felt the JD didn’t fit being a web backend engineer my entire career. It was only when I sat back and thought about it that I realised there was quite a bit of overlap. While the backend of a particular website and its functionality was my “speciality”, almost all (actually, all) of the jobs involved building integrations, ensuring integrity, cleanup, collating info from various source, transformation, schedulers, etc.

Once I looked it from that perspective, the tension vanished. Technically it was the same job. The only difference I could see was scale as well as the breadth of AWS stack being used. That was just about picking up a new technology to get the job done. I had done that before. I had my intuition to guide me. I was sure to stumble, slip, crawl, fall & fail.. and fall. I knew I would be frustrated, confused, struggling…

However, one thing that remained consistent about me since I heard it from Kiran (my first boss) for the first time was… I’d get sh** done.

The Bias

I wish I didn’t have this part. However, such is life.

• “Office Space”

The image of a large organisation played out in my head as the “Office Space” movie. It was my go to movie to relax. The “people skills” part along with the one where they destroy the printer are gold. Actually, the entire movie is. I’ve never had any of the experiences depicted in the movie and hence didn’t take any of it seriously.

The problem was this thought lingering in my head about how “large organisations” could be like that. I was instantly proven wrong when I had my chat with Rajesh – someone whom I’ll refer to for the rest of my life as my first officially titled “engineering manager”.

A nice human being who listens to you and points you to the places you need to know about for getting your stuff. He never asked me “what’s happening?”. (you’ll know if you watch the movie)

• Visibility of work

Another bias was about the visibility of work. This wasn’t from the movie, but from peers. In all my previous organisations, due to the size, my work and decisions were instantly visible as well as impactful – regardless of whether they were good or bad. The feedback loop was immediate, real and strong. Forcing you to learn, improvise and adapt quick. Assuming you fall into that category of people who take pride in their craft instead of just doing a job, there’s a certain level of Engineering maturity that comes with it when you see the business depends on you directly. You are directly a part of the decisions being made and you can make an impact on the business.

This part is different in here. I am not one to question since I don’t have the experience of the folks within the organisation who have been running it successfully for such a long time. They structured it in such a way that Engineering & Business were one step apart without having a direct connection. As much as I feel I don’t operate my best in that setup, I “improvise, adapt & overcome” for learning from the new experience. I still seek the reasons trying to have a much better understanding of the overall picture, but I am not there yet.

The Team

The Data Engineering / Integration team – The DI Team, and we DI trying. We are a group function. Essentially meaning that our work spans across the entirety of the services / brands that make Travelopia.

Recently Sree talked about the history of the team and how it is special to the organisation and even more so, to him. Time makes stories and the flow is only evident in retrospect. We’ll probably cover that one in a separate post. I like our team, but the week spent together at Bangalore during September made me like ’em all even more.

In an alphabetically sorted order, following are the folks from our team (for a vague definition of it since I haven’t seen an ‘official’ version of it yet) and how I know them. Since the work and the responsibilities are so vast, I haven’t had the chance to spend a lot of time with a few of them. Hence, I reiterate that this is from my perspective alone as “the human beings I work with”. Read it with a smile and please take it on a lighter note.

Abhijit Sahani
We joined on the same day. September 11th. While I was at the Bangalore office, he was on screen joining remotely. Someone who is grounded in reality, unlike me (now that I mention it, I think most people do have a much better grasp of reality than me!). A calm and composed soul who is skilfully juggling his personal and professional life. The “grounded in reality” part has made me reach out to him more than a few times regarding different perspectives of organisational hierarchy and how things get done.

Abhishek Yadav
He is the first person in my life whom I interviewed and gave a thumbs up to. I still remember how Nizam and I were staring at the screen during his live coding session thinking “this guy has lost it and going in some completely different direction”. We were ready to cut him off when we noticed that he was reaching the solution in an entirely different manner. His resume fit, he was smart and the coding session really impressed us. Nizam and I were like, “how did he do that?” (Reminds me of Jackie Chan jumping off a landing with cables tied around him in Who Am I)

Ameen Ahsan
You can talk about anything around him. A jolly soul who is always up for a laugh. Curious and driven by nature as well as extremely good at tech, he has a lot of projects under him on which our organisation runs today and he keeps exploring the ways in which things can be made better. Just so that I am not put on the spot, he is a huge fan of poetry and believes it is about time that pip be retired.

Anshika Srivastava
When she sent out that invitation to join something called “Fun Friday” a couple of months back, all of us were like – “now what is this about!?”. Our scepticism was answered by an eye-watering-laughing pictionary playing online event on that Friday which not only did we enjoy, but also helped us bond even better as a team since it brought out our inner humor sense and “picture identification skills”. One whom I work closely with in my recent project, her entry as a QA is what made all the difference in terms of the future of it.

Athul
If it weren’t for him patiently explaining the debugging process of certain failed systemd process sitting on a mature EC2 instance that was responsible for ensuring the output of an ML model was synced back one of its sources, I wouldn’t have had made it through the first few months of my job. An extremely smart yet quiet by nature person, he was someone about whom I had already heard a lot from my brother, but had the good fortune to experience first hand as well.

Devendra
One among my first two reportees. I had never done pair programming in my life and it was the norm of the company. He was the first person whom I did it with and found how useful it is in certain contexts. Very receptive and curious, he is as gentle and down to earth as a person can be. Our fates at Travelopia are intertwined since we both have been assigned to be the keepers of the Catalyst track. We trade Hollywood movie as well as cartoon recommendations quite often. Information security is his calling and his love for bikes is what will probably get him there. He he. (I could go on, but will save it for later).

Oh, and he is the one who introduced me to LLMs – “there’s this thing called ChatGPT”, he said.

Eldho
One of the senior folks on our team. It was only recently that I got a chance to work him hand in hand, and it was a pleasure! It is common knowledge across the company regarding how he is able to retain and recollect the smallest of details from oldest of projects. And hence, it is very nice to brainstorm with him because the discussion flows so effortlessly without having to search & reverify every little thing. He literally and figuratively knows what he is talking about, is a mentor to many and is our lead product owner (a title I’m still curious to learn more about), hence managing our daily standups as well.

Haris
“An un-self-managed, negative thinking angry young man with a blaming mentality who generally has a lack of trust and spreads toxicity and seeks attention”

Isaac Raja
There are a few people whom I’ve met who falls into the category of being a wise man comparable to a glass of water so full to the brim with knowledge that just by standing close to the glass, you’ll get the water on you. And this is not “gyaan” or “advice”. Just pure, unadulterated knowledge. My first impression of him was as of a very serious, quiet guy who doesn’t waste time indulging in senseless banter. Someone whom you should * only * interact with for that exact thing you need and then steer clear of.

Boy oh boy, was I wrong! Not just wrong, but completely wrong. Not only does he enjoy a good laugh, he is a master at finding excuses for it too! A fellow good at heart, extremely helpful and someone with a myriad of interests outside of tech as well. As much as an introvert he is, it was a true moment of true leadership (and an inspiration for me) when he put forward the idea of the mini hackathon (Using local LLMs to answer questions about our documentation). Everyone * wanted * to follow him.

Nizam Mohamed
Coming from the web app backend monoliths world, I’ve had my frustrations more than a few times with all the microservice architecture going on here and to know that this guy wrote the first AWS Lambda within our org only makes me hate him even more! He he…
One among the early employees of the team, someone with a good sense of the tech he works with, and a very soft spoken friendly persona. Literally a neighbor, I was fortunate to meet his family recently when they were coming over to spend an evening at Karma Road.

Pankaj Bhatt
One among the freshers, someone who loves learning and pushing his own limits. A jolly guy who I remember desperately tried to get us to paintball during our team outing. A humble fellow who taught me about the knap sack problem, I’m sure I’ll have more to write about him over the coming months and years.

Pavan
One among my first two reportees. A well rounded engineer with a bright future. Someone whom I enjoyed working with a lot. Curious about his machine, passionate about his work, the only time he’ll get angry is if you don’t hit the cork after he shouts “yours” during a badminton game. A good company to have in any gathering, I hope the work we’ve both put into the project together over the last year will soon start to pay dividends. (Much like Devendra, I could keep going, but will save it for later)

Pradeep Bhat
One of the first few folks I met from the team, and I am still thankful to him for sharing one half of the roti during my first lunch with them. I believe his official title is “Project Manager” (another title much like ‘product owner’ that I am curious about). He has been one of the people whom I’ve depended on to get to know more about the business and how things work. Someone who keeps track of the projects of the data engineering team, its resource and time allocation, he is a pro badminton player and a nice person to pick a chat with.

Rajesh Iyer
The OG of the data engineering team – as Sree puts it. Our Engineering Manager as well as a father figure to many. As I mentioned earlier, I had my initial conversation with him with “Bill Lumbergh” in mind and within the first few seconds of the conversation, I felt ashamed of myself for having had that image in my head at all. Someone who is looking forward to the next stage of his life – to make a difference in the world rather than Github PRs. I was lucky to have this overlap of my time with him where he told me his story and how it is a career choice, but an important one, to maintain your hands on curiosity on tech as and when you go up the corporate ladder.

Reshma
An ace QA, she was away for a huge chunk of the last year, busy welcoming her bundle of joy to this world. It has only been through the daily standups that I know she is someone whom quite a few projects of the team depends on to ensure its quality. I’m sure our paths will cross soon & I look forward to me rising to the fight when she challenges the work that I do.

Senthil
One of the senior folks along with Eldho who has seen the evolution of our team first hand. An extremely soft spoken person whom I haven’t had the chance to interact much with over the days until now. I’m sure it is going to be just a matter of time before our paths cross and hence will leave this part as it is for now.

Sreehari
The chill dude. Any and every interaction that I can think of his, he has that vibe about him. Getting his “good game” remark for a badminton game during our September ’24 team retreat was a huge confidence booster for me personally. I was playing after 15 years, and my confidence going into the game was literally 0.

As far as my understanding goes, there’s isn’t an exact “so many members for this team” kind of a rule. There are quite a few people we consistently engage with for different projects at one point or another – Dan, Steve, Shilpi, Jaysheel, Roshna, Harish, etc.

However, I wouldn’t feel like I did it justice unless I wrote about 3 more people.

Sreenath
Whenever I try to come up with a description of him in any conversation (including now), I always talk about how he was the only person who got my 6 year old comfortable enough to talk during the time I took her to visit the office. That reflects the way his conversations are and hence why I felt it was important to mention it. My conversations with him revolve around the lines of what it means to be an Engineer and a Tech lead. Someone who convinced me of the “boy scout rule” from his personal experience even outside of tech, I look forward to the time when I’m able to collaborate with him directly on a project.

Venky
A “high energy person” in his own words that sometimes his energy is so high that you’re left with no choice but to tune your energy down so as to not disrupt the energy equilibrium of the universe!

I already mentioned about the tea and “catcher in the rye” earlier. A book that I immensely enjoyed. The “energy” part wasn’t a joke either. After the incident, I consistently have conversations with him. He asks these difficult questions, and slowly nudges me into practical ways to find answers for it. He has a way of leading a conversation and making sure it stays afloat with the subject of what it is about instead of unknowingly diverging away into tangents. I’ve already been able to not only apply the thoughts I’ve learnt from him, but also practically experience the difference it makes.

Sree
I’ve heard from more than a few people at the organisation that the attitude / culture of the team is a trickle down effect from him. I haven’t had the chance to spend too much time with him personally though. He has a good amount of history with both my brother and Vamsee – the two people whom which my referral came through. A religious person and someone who consistently tries to lead by example, he has quite a few stories to tell about Enchanting Travels becoming a part of Travelopia, about witnessing the growth of certain people through their career paths and about what it takes to keep an organisation running.

Experiences

• No Coffee for you:
  
  Around the mid of November 2023, there were a bunch of folks from UK visiting the Bangalore office out which one of them was none other than our CTO – Mike Blakemore. For whatever reason, he had setup these 15 – 30 minute catchups with the “senior” employees and one among them was me. The poor guy was having a hard time with a nasty cold and a sore throat too I believe.
  
  By the time it was my slot, he came out and rushed past me apologising saying he wanted to get a coffee. I followed him thinking it’d be nice to chat there over coffee rather than in the cubicle. He put the cup under the coffee machine and clicked on whatever his choice was (sorry, not a coffee connoisseur here) and it went “pookhhhhh”. Tried again “pooookhhh”. It was empty.
  
  It was 6.30PM, it was getting dark and most of the people had left the building. Even though I saw Sree & Venky standing at the other end of the office, it felt weird to run up to them & interrupt saying “no coffee!” (now that I know them better, today I actually would do it). So I decided to go get Sreejith instead and took a few steps to head down the 2nd floor when Mike called me back and said its okay. He asked me about water and I pointed to the tap that all of us take water from.
  
  He put the glass under it and asked “will it be okay if I drink this?”
  My mind answered “How the heck should I know man!?”
  My mouth answered “Umm, yeah.. We all drink that….”
  
  He didn’t take that either and we ended up having our chat with the poor guy sneezing and coughing. Apparently he had a stomach upset before due to some similar experience and he was just trying to be careful. It was my 3rd month on the job, I was happy to get that time with the CTO and I blabbered away like an idiot. I remember him saying “you seem happy”.
  
  
• Almost getting fired (and learning what “raised to the HR” means)
  
  Venky and I recently discussed about how the context of a moment past & the reasons of its being is never fully recreatable.
  
  That being said, as they say, “there are levels to this sh**”, and the levels are taken pretty seriously. A combination of my lack of understanding of that seriousness along with the effect of Chinese whisper led to this happening.
  
  While expressing my concern over a faulty metric I found that was being used to evaluate the effectiveness of one of the functions we had implemented, I was misunderstood and the decision was made to let me go. Before it was enforced, Venky decided to have a conversation with me. The “how I expressed my concern” was then identified to be the problem. Neither the “what” and nor the “why”. Now you know why the title says “survived”.
  
  It was personally even worse for me because I was expecting my thanks for having pinpointed the fault (something outside of my “employment responsibilities”) when Rajesh mentioned “raised to the HR” to me in a rather gloomy tone. I was not aware of that phrase. To be honest, I even thought “wow, even the HR wants to talk to me about my find?”. However, the tone suggested something else and a conversation with a friend of mine revealed to me what it actually meant.
  
  From experience, being fired for the right reasons is an experience that I value. It happened to me back in 2016, and I keep it close to my heart. As impractical as it sounds, it is so up there at the top of my concerns that it not only acts as an instantaneous personal SOS for the last 8 years, but also helps me hold true to the trust between myself and the organisation that I’ve made a professional commitment with.
  
  Venky generously offered me his time to help me with getting a better grasp of the “how” and we’ve been consistently chatting over the last few months.
  
  
• Raising a concern (and a * huge * self reflection)
  
  During the initial months of a project we were working on, I raised quite strong concerns over mismanagement around it. My frustration at not being acknowledged came out very explicitly and I felt bad about the way I reacted to the situation.
  
  The “raised to the HR” incident happened after this, and hence I assume both was read together. However, I was conflicted trying to put things in perspective.
  
  It was during this time that I attended an event at Pune and it was one of the best decision I made in recent years:
  
  https://x.com/harisibrahimkv/status/1825928166365376714
  
  Siddharth offered me his time. During the initial call, I brought this up. He listened patiently and finally asked:
  
  “You’re still working there because of one person’s compassion. Where was that compassion of yours?”
  
  I was dumbfounded. The conversation carried on for a while where he narrated his experiences and certain unwritten rules about how to navigate situations such as these. How “feedback” isn’t what is important, but “helpful feedback” is. How “helpful feedback” isn’t just about the content, but the strategy of presentation as well.
  
  I spent a lot of early mornings by myself reflecting on this and I wrote kept on writing to introspect. There were two things I wanted to do:
  – Genuinely apologise. Not the “sorry” to calm things down. Not do the “bygones be bygones, let’s move over” thingie.
  – Ensure I never put anyone else ever in that spot.
  
  As I mentioned, Venky gave me his time generously during this phase. While the lesson I was learning along with the growth from this experience in the long run was important, as was the practical steps I could take to man up and face the situation. Long story short, I achieved the first and I could face the people involved with an open heart. I am prepared for the second.
  
  The funny thing was how I felt looking at this entire situation from the perspective of a third person – unnecessarily serious.
  
  
• Events and retreats
  
  There were a bunch of events and retreats over the year ranging from outings, parties, gatherings at the office on special occasions, gatherings at the office during the times when people from the UK visits, etc. I had a good time at all of them that I attended. Here are bits and pieces from them:
  
  * The year end party:
  It was at a club in Indira Nagar. If memory serves me right, it was the first time I was at that sort of a bar. The woman at the entry gave me two small ticket like thingies and I wasn’t really sure what they were for. Well, until conversations started happening about whether I had my “shots” and if not, whether I could lend them my “tickets”. That’s when the power I had hit me. But before I could toy with it, Kirana caught me and confiscated those tickets of mine. Apparently it was to control the number of drinks people can buy from the bar. Nice.
  
  * The Onam Sadya:
  My first experience cutting up flowers to make the pookalam. Scissors, chopping boards, knifes and what not.
  
  * The September ’24 team meet:
  It was a lovely week. Everyone shared a lot of history about themselves and we laughed and we laughed and we laughed. It was a good choice for the company to have booked an Airbnb apartment as opposed to the usual individual hotel rooms. Gave us all enough common space to sit and chit chat.
  
  It gave me the opportunity to connect personally with a few of them as time allowed as well. That moment was a realisation for me.
  
  We did a team cooking event at Slurp Studios. It wasn’t really my first time cooking, but when you see the humor and fun of the team that you work with day in day out in a context other than tech, you feel touched. Suffice to say, we cut, we chopped, we knead, we heated, we fried, we joked, we laughed, we cooked and last but definitely not the least, we slurped! Yep, all of us ate what we cooked if you can believe that. He he…
  
  We had a badminton event. While it was a game, it was a highlight for me. Not in terms of wins or losses or performance, but at a very intricate personal level. Also, as I mentioned above, Sreehari’s “good game” made a * huge * impact. I laugh at how such a “small thing” viewed from the eyes of another person, can be a life changing event in someone else’s. Extremely grateful to everyone who played with me that day.
  
  
• Someone has heard of Travelopia!
  
  Up until August ’24, whenever I mentioned I worked at “Travelopia”, it gave people the idea of a “ticket booking company” immediately. The conversation starts with “not like Cleartrip or Makemytrip…”. And then it hits the spot with “We have our own Jet“.
  
  1.
  The event at Pune which I mentioned earlier, led me to join a discord called “The Engineering Org” (TEO). Everyone who joins introduces themselves. After mine, a friend from back in my HasGeek days, whom I haven’t been in touch with for a long time, replied saying, obviously “long time”. We setup a call and had a chat.
  
  As I said, the notion of people not having heard about the companies I worked for was not new to me. However with Ashwin, when I mentioned Travelopia, he thought for a moment and said – “That UK based company, isn’t it? I know someone from there…”
  
  “Oh, first time someone has heard of it in my circle. Who is it?”, I asked.
  
  “Some Rajesh… Rajesh…”
  
  “Gosh! He knows my manager??”, I thought to myself.
  
  “Rajesh.. Thiagarajan. We worked together at RecruiterBox“
  
  2.
  I recently attended Rootconf. I was only too happy to meet one of my earliest programming mentors – Anand Chitipothu. We hugged and had a lot of catch up on, in the midst of which I mentioned where I work at.
  
  “Oh, you work with Sree? I did a Python training for them just a year or so back”
  
  I almost mentioned “Yep! He is one of my 5 bosses”, but restrained myself.
  
  Anand continued, “You know a fun fact? He hosted the 2nd Bangpypers meetup since it started”
  
  Again I chuckled to myself thinking about the irony of how I’ve been trying to get the org to host a Bangpypers meetup since the last 2 or 3 months.
  
  3.
  At the same event, we were having a BoF around “Use boring tech”. I met Neependra Khare there, who gives corporate trainings on Kubernetes. He was a nice person to chat with and again, when I mentioned where I work at, he mentioned, “Oh, you work with Vamsee”.
  
  
• The #books channel coming to life
  On 23rd May ’24, I had finished rereading “Round the World in Eighty Days” after a long time. It was one of those hardcover ladybird classics which was one of the very first unabridged books that I had finished end to end during my childhood. One of the books that marked my coming of age. One of the books that you fall in love with the way it looks, the way it feels, the way it smells and finally the way it makes you feel with the story.
  
  Reading, stories and especially fiction, isn’t for everyone. No judgement there. People get drawn to different things. However, it is always nice to find peers. I spoke my mind about my wish, Sree replied saying to get it done and hence the #books channel on our Slack was born.
  
  Here’s the list that’s been discussed so far:
  
Fiction
* Round the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
Science Fiction
* Foundation’s Edge - Isaac Asimov Our Final Invention: Artificial
* Intelligence and the End of the Human Era - Gary Dana & James Barrat
  * The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
  * Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom - Cory Doctorow
  * Makers - Cory Doctorow
  * Walkaway - Cory Doctorow
  * Silo Trilogy - Hugh Howey
  * The 3 body problem trilogy - Cixin Liu
Fantasy
* The Wise Man’s Fear - Patrick Rothfuss
Technical
* The Phoenix Project: A Novel about It, Devops, and Helping Your Business Win - Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
Self Help
* The Surrender Experiment (Lead Title): My Journey into Life's Perfection - Michael A. Singer
  * Be more pirate - Sam Conniff Allende
  * HBR's 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence (With Featured Article "What Makes a Leader?" by Daniel Goleman): HBR's 10 Must Reads Series - Harvard Business Review, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Annie McKee, Sydney Finkelstein
  * Why Travel Matters - Craig Storti
  * Manage Your Mind: The Mental Fitness Guide - Gillian Butler
Auto Biography
* Limitless - Tim Peake
  * The Ride of a Lifetime - Robert Iger
Gamers
* Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
  * Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
True Crime
* Dark Wire
  

Summary
– An extremely interesting year especially from the perspective of coming to a corporate from 9 years of working at startups
– Impressed by the default compassion & trust and the organisation has towards its employees. From the perspective of “human beings working at an org”. Reflects in terms of work hours, leave policies & benefits
– Yet to figure out the reasons behind a few of the “processes for the sake of processes” that are in place like “objective setting”.
– As I touched up on before, frustrated with the gap between “engineering” & “business”. Still trying to learn (and hence can’t judge) why that was made the norm.
– Enjoying pair programming to an extent, but still not convinced about how “that has to be the way”
– If you are at a point in your life where you want a “work life balance”, then an amazing place for it. (I differ in my outlook towards making ‘work life balance’ as ‘the * only * way to do it’)
– Having a separate work laptop has worked wonders for me. Especially having stopped listening to music while working.
– Happy with the pay, but extremely sad with the taxes (first time having that experience since I worked as a ‘consultant’ before and hence the realisation). Not something to do directly with the company, but just personally.
– Happy with the work challenges and extremely happy with the learnings so far. It was evident while talking with a few of my peers from the past.
– Happy about the final impact of my work being about “enabling travelling”.
– Toughening up to not let an employer emotionally break me.

Wrapping up
You learn by trying things. You learn even more by finishing ’em.

A year’s worth of experience is a lot to write, and I am keen on learning. For those few of you who know about this post coming, it’s a been a while since I started working on this. I recently saw someone making a bullet point list of things to do tomorrow and striking them off one by one. I am striking “finish the one year blog post” off today. I might come back with edits. Might.

I am by no means an introvert, but I have my moments when I disconnect. That being said, there are a LOT of people whom I had very nice chats with during the last year. And hence a lot of people to thank. I’ve started appreciating time and health like never before and hence thank you to all of you there who took even a minute of your time to have a chat. Especially Mehar, Kirana & Savithri having had the patience to answer my queries again and again and again…. and again.

Last but not the least… definitely not the least.. thank you Isaac and Pavan. Thank you for just mindlessly laughing with me on that Friday afternoon about every little random thing under God’s Green Earth. Ignoring work and ignoring everything else. Otherwise that would’ve been my last day at Travelopia.