GoLearning in a Fortnight: Phase I of Gojek’s Pre-Bootcamp

1st July 2020 was a very monumental day for me. It was the day I started my first job as a Software Engineer in Gojek. Gojek, in case you don’t know, is an Indonesian decacorn Super App that provides over 20 services including cab hailing, food delivery and digital payments with over 170 million users throughout SouthEast Asia. In this medium post, I’ll shed some light on what Gojek does with its new graduates every year (spoiler: bootcamp!) and what my learnings are from the first two weeks of being a part of this “super” company.

So, under normal circumstances, what happens on the first day when you join a company? Well, all the new hires are called to the office and given an office tour, a bunch of onboarding and documentation sessions and a system. Well, due to the pandemic (yes, re-read the date of my joining again), the first part was obviously cancelled. However, everything else happened as smoothly as possible thanks to the power of the internet! We all pretty much Zoomed our way through the onboarding sessions from the comfort of our homes and everything was complete before the sun even went down. And oh, the good people at the Bangalore office of Gojek couriered Macbooks to each one of us across India. A big shout out to them!

When I was in college, I (and I’m sure even you) never really bothered about stuff like readability and maintainability when coding. Good coding practices are not really a part of the computer science curriculum and as long as the code works, students don’t really bother with such stuff. Also, most of the courses in college only cover the basics and theorectical aspects without diving into the specific tools and system design (ever built an end-to-end scalable system hosted on a cloud platform like AWS in a college course?). These are some of the reasons why Gojek hosts a comprehensive bootcamp every year for its new-grad hires. But before the bootcamp starts, we go through a pre-bootcamp phase which is like a trailer before the actual movie. I’ve only been in Gojek for a few weeks at the time of writing this post so I can only tell you about the trailer for now.

Takeaways from the Pre-Bootcamp

• User and technical stories. So another thing not taught to us in college is the Agile methodology that apparently tons of companies in the world abide by. We had some sessions on product design process and learnt about how user stories are written and how they get divided into several technical stories.
• TDD. Need I say more? I never really cared about writing unit tests but now I see why they are so important in software development.
• Clean code practices. We were actually told to go through the famous Robert Martin book and given some coding assignments as a test. I’ll be frank, I was blown away while reading the inital chapters of that book. I never really gave two thoughts before naming a variable or a function before, nor did I ever care about the flow of the code. Competitive programming really takes a toll on you, doesn’t it?
• Gojek being a super app is divided into several teams. One cool guy from each team took a session and gave us an introduction about their work. These sessions were super informative and gave me a good high-level overview of how Gojek actually works.
• Gojek and open source go hand in hand! I knew Gojek way before they visited our college for campus placements because of their name in the open source community. In the pre-bootcamp, we got an introduction to all major open source projects that Gojek has developed in-house and are now being used by many companies throughout the globe.

Well, that’s it for this post. Stay tuned!