From Internship to Full-time.
By: Arsil Zunzunia
Tags: Full Time, Software Engineering, Career

Hi Guys,

Today I would like to share my experience from being an Intern at Koshex to full-time. I have already shared my journey of how I got an internship at Koshex, in this article.

So after 9 months of internship today @ 15th July 2021, I am joining Koshex as a full-time Software Development Engineer-1.

In these 9 months of internship, every day when I woke up I used to think today I will be learning something new and this motivated me a lot. I got the opportunity to work on different projects, I learned a lot from Frontend to Backend to Databases to DevOps. Initially, I was working on an internal application where I was mentored by the Co-Founder Mr. Komal Kumar Gupta aka KG where we built everything from scratch. Working on some internal tool as an intern sounds simple, right? It was a serious application with an intention to reduce the load of ops and sales team by at least 50X. UI/UX was required to be smooth and trendy (so much customization and not just template picking), dealing with real-time production data by taking care of all the data security practice and it has to be super fast.

Here I learned the nuances of production-level engineering. From code standard to data security. From generic to complex and what not. There is a big difference between what we do in college and in a company. While building this project he guided me through the best practices of Software Development.

After completion of that project, since I was interested in JavaScript’s Development Stack so I was given the opportunity to learn Angular and work on the product’s Frontend, and it was very exciting for me because I was getting a chance to work on something which is used by a lot of smart peoples. In this project, I was mentored by FE Lead Mr. Vinod Kumar Shyave. Vinod is an awesome human being, an amazing engineer, a great teacher, and at the same time Lazy as he could be. He taught me the best practices of Frontend Development. Earlier I used to think “there is nothing much in the Frontend, no challenges” but I was wrong and found out that Frontend Development is a very challenging and important aspect of Web Application Development.

And we have reached December 2020, where my internship period ended and I had my exams in January. After my exams, I was again offered an internship.

In February 2021 I started my internship 2.0 with Koshex, now since I already had little experience with development I was given an opportunity to work on some complex stuff. And here comes the Microservice architecture, I started building a microservice from scratch. It was not just development but I got a chance to understand the business use case of why we are building what we are building.

Working with KG always get the feeling of a Leader and Learner relationship, yeah you read that right, leader and learner, not the boss. Trust me he’s one of the best mentors I have in my life. He always gave me a chance to try things first, and then jump to actual implementation. The biggest mistakes we freshers make is when given a task we directly jump into coding, but this should not be the case while working on any complex problem or I would say any problem. First, we need to understand the requirement then plan how this would be implemented. We should also think of different approaches, we should be able to make tradeoffs among different approaches, thinking of all edge cases, after all the above steps are done then we should start coding. One learns all of the above when working with great leaders.

“Ask questions, no questions are stupid”

this mentality from him gave me the confidence of asking all of my doubts with no fear of feeling dumb. There’s a lot to learn from him, and will surely eat his brain more.😛

That was all positive stuff, but not every day is the same. Sometimes I failed, so I was guided on the right path.

“You tried that thing honestly, you failed but you should not be guilty because you tried”

this was the mindset I was given. The attitude of not giving up, figuring out multiple approaches for a problem and then choosing the one that best suits the use case, thinking deeply from the users perspective, breaking a complex problem into simple ones, etc are the things which I have learned in this short period of time.

That was all about development but is that the only thing? When you work in an organization you look for a good Team.

Though everything is virtual for now we are having a great time from standups to meetings. One important thing I have learned is everyone’s ready to take feedback in the team, Vinod being a FE Lead also asks for feedback and that inspires me. I always try to get positive criticism from my seniors. I have realized the power of working in a team.

We are on the journey of building “a pioneer AI-first wealth-tech platform for your Entire Financial Life, that helps you spend, save, and manage your money in a smart, affordable, and reliable way using contextualized insights for every single penny of yours”. We are on a mission to solve this problem for people like me and you. We’re a country of ~400M Millennials but most of us were not taught finance at home, schools, and colleges which leads to poor financial decisions in our life. That is where Koshex comes into the picture, a solution around individuals and not the industry: Simple, fast, and hyper-personalised.

No matter at what stage you are, you can start growing your Kosh(Money) from today itself, open your account today here

I feel lucky to be a part of an organization that is solving such an important problem in people’s lives and adding so much value.

Finally, I would like to thank my team @ Koshex for giving me this opportunity to solve real-world problems. There is a lot more to learn, build and break stuff.

#onwardsAndUpwards!!

You can reach me at my LinkedIn profile also check out my GitHub profile.