HOW WE'RE BUILDING THE WORLD'S BEST DEVELOPERS

Tech Vidhya is helping our people shift from the practice of getting things done to a culture of doing things right.

From the earliest days of Market Pulse, we found that most developers we hired were very good at coding, but not many were actively looking to understand the principles of coding – the why behind the what.

Last year, this vision took shape in Tech Vidhya: an open, people-driven forum for upskilling, collaborating, sharing knowledge and developing fresh talent.

Tech

LEARNING THE WHY.

Everything at Market Pulse comes down to clean code and evolutionary design. Centered on this tenet, we address the very fundamentals of tech practices in Tech Vidhya.

We teach people the importance of writing code that is clean, easy to maintain, and not harrowing for other team members to work on at a future time.

We push them to unlearn wrong coding practices and principles.

We encourage them to question, dig and discover new ideas and concepts.

We help them solve real practical problems that online tech communities cannot teach.

The focus of all this learning is to master principles over tools — the why and why not instead of the how and what.

DOING THINGS BETTER.

At the rate we’re tackling fresh problems, we often run into new technology outside our domain. Tech Vidhya gives us an opportunity to learn new tech and use it proficiently.

But it’s not always about doing something new; it’s also about getting better at what we already know.

In a lot of Tech Vidhya sessions we focus on code refactoring, and share the ways in which we relentlessly eliminate bad code.

In one case, when we found that our usage of Git branching strategies was inconsistent and incorrect in some cases, we did a session to recognize and adapt a better, standardized strategy.

In another example, we discovered that developers had strong preferences for using MVC, MVP, MVVM, VIPER patterns, based on their disparate understandings of each. We did a session to clear misconceptions, bring everyone on the same page, and realize that each of these patterns fails in its true form, and needs additional layering for success in real large-scale projects. This was truly an enriching cross-domain session.

Whether we’re learning about robust architecture, TDD, refactoring or writing beautiful code, Tech Vidhya sessions are always constructive and crucial to what we love doing.

Microservers

LOOKING OUTSIDE COMFORT ZONES.

People in most tech companies are trained to see a given problem solely through the lens of their single area of expertise. In this environment, they are unlikely to attempt something else, something outside their comfort skills.

We believe real growth lies in this challenging ‘outside’.

A big example of this ethos is the Elixir story. At the start of our second year, we leaped from the comfort of Ruby into the unfamiliar territory of Elixir — a whole new paradigm. We chose it because it was the best solution for the problem. And it paid off more than we could ever imagine. Many of our developers were curious to know why and how we made the switch. The Tech Vidhya session on this helped a lot of object-oriented devs understand the functional programming paradigm through Elixir. Today we’re using Elixir fluently to develop multiple services and solutions.

At Market Pulse we like to give full play to our innate ability to conquer the unknown. This is why we have 8 microservices and 60+ servers deployed and managed by developers, not devops.

GOING BEYOND SILOS.

In the same spirit of transcending boundaries, our most interesting sessions delve into cross-domain sharing. At Tech Vidhya we invite people to drop their various breeds, types and titles, and come together as just developers – to learn, question and share across skills, languages and domains. So we’ve had back-end guys interested in iOS, or an Android dev itching to test the waters of AI. Through the Tech Vidhya program, they break silos and engage freely with others outside their domain in a mutually nurturing knowledge flow.

Through such pushing of limits, our team has grown into a technically sound eco system of people well-versed in delivering out-of-the-box solutions.

ASKING ‘HOW DID WE DO THAT?’

Working on specific micro tasks, more and more people become interested in how the macro picture works. One such picture was charts back-end. Market Pulse is the only company in the financial sector to have its own charting product. Our devs were eager to understand the original problem and how we solved it by creating our own chart back-end. This was a real classic in the Tech Vidhya session archives.

KNOWING WHAT COMES NEXT.

Knowledge is also about becoming future-ready. Some sessions give insights in advance about something that someone is already using at Market Pulse. This makes everyone better equipped to use that solution in the future, or innovate to solve a similar problem. Like our recent cache server solution.

Sandwitches

AND WHAT COMES FIRST!

The sandwiches, of course! Part of the Tech Vidhya tradition involves the person leading the session bringing snacks for the whole team to kick-start the evening. This is one thing we’re really missing in our WFH version of Tech Vidhya!

GROWING BY HELPING OTHERS GROW.

Senior Developer Nikhil Belchada sums it up: “They say ‘teaching is like learning twice’. When I take a Tech Vidhya session, I go thoroughly prepared to answer all kinds of questions, expected or not, so that the knowledge-sharing is worth everyone’s time. This culture of being deeply invested in the development of each individual is something I really love about Market Pulse. Very few companies out there are doing this well, and hardly any start-ups. The greatest payoff is, when I nurture the growth of others, I grow tremendously.”

Everything we do in Tech Vidhya makes us more fundamentally aware as developers, and more cohesive as a team. It’s a great way to make the most of our collective experience for the growth of the whole.

In its future avatar, we see Tech Vidhya adding value to the entire tech community, as a much larger event with external participants. In fact we’ll be thrilled to have you join us for an upcoming session.

Meanwhile, in store for the next session: virtual club sandwiches, anyone?

KEEN TO SEE HOW YOU CAN GROW HERE? JOIN US