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New Year, New Journey l Meet The Team

Hello all, this is Abhishek Kumar, currently the newest member of the ShapeBlue family. It’s been over a month since I started working as a Software Engineer on Apache CloudStack at ShapeBlue, and I’m here to tell you about how it’s gone.

2019 has been an exciting year for me as I moved from the application development domain to infrastructure development. I always knew it will be a challenging task but also a rewarding one.

The beginning

It was last year that I moved to Gurugram, India, to work for a major med-tech company dealing with navigated intra-operative products. Prior to that, I’d been freelancing as a desktop and mobile application developer. Moving to Gurugram meant getting back in touch with some of the friends and batchmates from college who were already living and working in the city. Late last year one of these friends suggested to me the idea of applying to ShapeBlue, the company he had been working at for a number of years. I had previously heard about ShapeBlue and Apache Cloudstack from him, and I was interested in how the company works with a distributed team and how they contribute to open-source while delivering for their customers – they are community leaders in a sense. Initially I was quite unsure as I had never worked on something like this but after some deliberation, I decided to go through the compact yet effective hiring process of ShapeBlue. It involved two interviews, a coding challenge and a knowledge test on a subject that was chosen because they KNEW it was new to me (they were testing my ability to pick up new concepts very quickly). The whole process only took a week or so before I was hired as a Software Engineer at ShapeBlue!

The learning

This was my first experience of being a developer with infrastructure software and working as part of a large, open-source project. To be honest, to start with, everything was a bit overwhelming as it was mostly new to me – and the people I’m working with are probably the champions of the field. Within this first month, I’ve transitioned from C++ to Java, and have learned complex concepts of networking topologies, hypervisors and many other new subjects. I’ve not only been learning the fundamentals of the Apache Cloudstack project and working on customer projects but I’m also starting to contribute to the open-source community. A large part of this learning can be credited to the awesome training program that ShapeBlue provides for a new joinee. It is a very well-structured training course (called the “hackerbook”) that constitutes several chapters that explain a particular topic and then require the trainee to do some coding exercises to test the acquired knowledge. During the training period, a mentor is assigned to the trainee to clear any doubts, review progress and even have 1-2-1 sessions on complex topics. This contrasts with what I’ve experienced with previous employers and most programmers experience as well, where they are given access to a codebase and some limited documentation and left to figure things out on their own.

The challenges

As expected there have been a number of challenges. Moving from developing consumer-centric small applications to working on massive, complex infrastructure orchestration software would never have been easy. Then there are always those regular things one faces when moving to a new job: onboarding on company infra, learning new services and technologies to do daily tasks, following new practices & policies, etc. With Apache Cloudstack being an open-source project, it adds another dimension as it is not just your own organization but the larger community that you are dealing with.

Apart from the technical aspect I also find the social aspect of onboarding with a new organization a bit testing personally. Being a reserved, quiet, person, gelling with new people isn’t always easy for me. However, over the last month at ShapeBlue I can safely say that all these have been exciting challenges. While the technical aspects were taken care of with well-structured training, the social aspect took care of itself due the intrinsic flat organizational structure at ShapeBlue where everyone has equal say and has the freedom to communicate with anybody else in the company irrespective of their position.

The joy

I have liked being able to jump between my training course and real-world customer facing development. I was able to use the concepts I learned, during this period, in the customer project I’m working on. Within this short span of time, even though I don’t have the expertise that my team has, I still feel like I can make a contribution to the project we are working on. I can still participate in the development of new features for customers and contribute to open-source community to some extent.

Conclusions

My time so far at ShapeBlue has been nothing less than amazing! I could not wish for a better mix of challenges and rewards. Most days I do have to work hard to make sense of a very large codebase or some complex network concepts, but with enough effort, I can work my way through and go home satisfied. Being a software developer in the infrastructure domain can be challenging and learning to become a better and more efficient one might be even harder, but so far, I’m enjoying this job and loving this journey with my new work family: ShapeBlue!

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