Let me just start off the bat by talking about how fantastic of an organisation is Pratilipi , from the amazing work culture that supports your personal as well as professional growth to providing flexible as well as an ownership driven culture , working here is the ideal kickstart to my career.
Pratilipi is an Indian online self-publishing and audiobook portal. It features content in twelve languages: Hindi, Urdu, English, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Punjabi and Odia. Pratilipi has grown from being a reading writing platform to an ecosystem with a literature community at its heart. The app functions like an ‘open mic’ for writers and provides a popular and safe space to upload stories for any user. It allows users to publish and read original works such as stories, poetry, essays and articles. It also allows readers to rate content posted by others. It was launched in September 2014 by Ranjeet Pratap Singh, Prashant Gupta, Rahul Ranjan, Sahradayi Modi, and Sankaranarayanan Devarajan to promote Indian languages.
I joined Pratilipi in the month of May as a Software Engineer in Test and as soon as I joined i was given an option to select the project I wanted to work upon. I started off with picking the android test automation project for our core product. Since I was making this tool from Scratch , I was required to make a project research document (PRD) , where I specified the features I wanted to add in my project , estimation of the time it is supposed to take and the targets it should achieve. All this was pretty new to me , i had never taken on a complete project by myself , but the team was very supportive throughout the process. They helped me with the design , optimisation and reviewed my code time to time. As a result a Appium/Python tool was created in 2 months which performed sanity tests across the app and helped discover important workflow and performance issues. It tested all services and sent slack alerts incase of any failures , if detected. Tool was widely accepted across all verticals and was appreciated for cutting down the time and effort required to perform mundane tests.
After the success of sanity tools i was shifted to the the recommendation team , which brings in the most traffic and is considered one of the most important verticals. There I wrote multiple tools to monitor our recommendation services and pointed out several bugs which cannot be revealed due to NDA.
I also learned a lot of new tools such as Jmeter for API load testing , TestNG with selenium and improved my coding style and structure to provide clean , efficient and readable code. Seeing the Knack of learning and understanding I was also got to work with tools like Jenkins , Dockers and AWS which boosted my grasp on deployment and delivery.
I also introduced new and efficient tools to the team such as BrowserStack which gave us an access to a suite of android and iOS handsets , it eliminated the need to ship different mobile phones to different members of verticals and created a streamlined source to manage all the test APKs. I also introduced Locust as a performance testing tool to the team , some members found it to be very insightful about the performance of the service and decided to use Locust with python scripting as it gave a chart analysis and explained the behaviour of failed services and ease of use to increase and decrease load. It also gave in-depth overview of the service.
Overall it was a great working experience , I had loads of fun and experience here. Everybody including the folks at Pratilipi and TnP cell , Bennett University were very helpful and stood with me at every step of the way. I will join Full time in October , 2021 as a SDET , Thanks to Naushad hamza sir at TnP Bennett university , and Gauri Kanekar , VP of engineering at Pratilipi. Special thanks to our alumni Devyanshu Shukla for the referral and guidance throughout.
Thank you for reading !!!
