The start of the Beginning.

One month.

Tremendous workload.

Zero social life.

Bare minimum sanity.

An exclusive scoop on how Appointy actually treats its interns. Beneath the flowery facade of kindness and chill, this is what actually goes down on a daily basis in this fiery Hell.

Just kidding.

It’s been a WHOLE YEAR! CALL FOR HELP!!

Now that we’ve broken the ice, sit back and help yourself to a bag of chips while I take you on my journey so far as a tech intern at Appointy.

It’s hard to believe that it’s just been a month.

Thirty days.

Picture the things you could accomplish in this duration. If you ask me, you could probably complete reading the entire Harry Potter series. Thrice.

But could you advance so much as to be working on your very own independent open source projects, building GraphQL implementation libraries, scalable data migration tools using such advanced technologies as Protocol Buffers, gRPC, and whatnot?

I would be surprised if that last sentence didn’t crack your head open into a clean two pieces.

If I would’ve known that it would be me doing all the above things 1 month down the road, I would bet you a million dollars and every overpriced hardcover novel I own that I wouldn’t remain sane even if I did do all this in a month’s time.

But that’s what Appointy’s culture is all about. Challenging your intellect and bringing you out of your comfort zone before you even realize it.

To ease you into understanding the work we do here, let me take you through my amazing 30-day transformation of how I lost 40 pounds of stupid by doing just this one thing every day.

Never Settle (don’t sue me OnePlus).

The Test

There’s nothing more exciting than sitting down for a company’s recruitment test where the task was to design an HTTP server API(no clue what it meant then) in a language you’ve never heard of in 3 hours.

All my college life, I’d heard of APIs being used for every goddamn thing under the sun but never really knew what it meant. The task was to make a user profiles API that returned JSON data when queried for things like

• User(by username)
• All users
• User friends(by username) and so on.

Took me a solid hour to understand what the words HTTP, server and API meant in unison and map out the design of the API. Then came the challenge of coding it in Golang which was done by copy-pasting snippets from the internet (yes, that was legal usage of the permitted net access) for things like, creating arrays, running for loops and stuff.

As you might’ve already sensed, this task wasn’t exactly testing your knowledge but your ability to learn in a constrained time period.

I got through and the next day,  we had our interviews. Just had a few chats with the CEO and 2 very impressionable employees about my college life and goals in general. No tech questions, no competitive BS.

Got my offer letter three days later.

First Impressions

Stepped foot into the office with some anxiety and a touch of nervousness. Gone were my potato days of binging Netflix shows from dawn till dusk.

Although the comfy seats and the massage chairs in the office were not a bad place to chill either.

These people didn’t conform to the archetypal image of an employee that I had in mind.

Squeaky clean shirts. Tie. Confined Cubicle. Hate their job. No will to live (probably went a little overboard with that).

They were just like us but working.

Training

This is where we were properly introduced to Golang, the alma mater of our current tech stack under development.

Coding in Golang is like that one friend that holds everything to its literal meaning, a bit frustrating at first but eventually, you can sleep peacefully at night knowing that there won’t be any more awkward silences due to miscommunication or maybe it just grew on me.

We had fun building chat applications, progressively swapping out each part with better technologies finally landing on Protocol Buffers and gRPC services.

Took all of us, interns, a week to get a grip on the idea and implementation of the said technologies.

Never really had any gaps in understanding owing to their well-thought-out training process. Well, I don’t actually know how much thought they put into it. I just know that it worked out alright.

Flock

Then came judgment day. Putting all this knowledge to test.

My first task, working on a database migration tool.

To give you some context, over the years Appointy’s code had been written in outdated technologies like the .NET framework and hosted its data on Microsoft’s SQL Server. Since the existing code was not modular and adaptable to the ever-changing tech industry, they decided to scrap it.

Yes. Ditch the code they’d spent almost 10 years writing and making a profit off of.

To yeet out the old code, they had to shift all their data to a new database which they decided would be PostgreSQL. Now to shift/migrate this massive data they needed a hunk of an automation tool.

In came Flock (name subject to change). My mentor, Krishna, had written down the base code which I had to improve on.

Took me a solid 3 weeks to complete, using all the things I’d learned during the training process and much more during the actual development. They made sure to make me understand the significance of the data being handled. Entire conglomerates are based on just data.

So this had to be done by being extremely pedantic, the error handling, the batching up of data on so many levels, the modular base to let users freely manipulate their data. It was interesting, to say the least.

Jaal

Appointy currently has an arsenal of indigenous tools which it uses on a daily basis for its services. Now you’ll probably be in the right to take the previous sentence literally when I tell you the names of some these tools – Chaku, Trishul, Pehredaar, Jaal.

So, having successfully cleared the first hurdle I was assigned my next task, working on our very own GraphQL library (Jaal), to implement subscriptions.

Now I won’t overload your brain with the details because I’d never heard of GraphQL either before stepping foot into Appointy but it’s interesting work.

So this is me at the time of writing this, laid bare to you in a 1000 words or so.

Looking Back

Let me paint you a picture of what I was before working here.

A six-point someone who took feeble jabs at competitive coding which did not interest me at all. Studying for exams only on the night prior.

Worked diligently only on the practical course projects because that is what incited interest in me.

All this didn’t matter to Appointy cause they gauge your potential and your ability to learn.

To sum it up, it’s easy cruising here as long you are true to your craft.

Now, this is not an Appointy appreciation post about how amazing and heavenly everything is here but a blog describing my experience and how this company is a good fit for me.

I didn’t mind staying in Bhopal for the summer, didn’t care for an over-the-top stipend which is sadly a compulsory criterion for some college students. I just craved for knowledge and adventure.

The one thing I learned for certain, being here, is that if you think you know something, you probably know only about 5-10% of it.

So, if you’re wondering, that’s what I’ll be doing the rest of this summer, breaking down barriers and stretching out my horizons.