A lazy evening in my bedroom and I wake up slowly as I squint my eyes from a power nap after a heavy supper, I scroll through my instagram feed looking at pictures of sunset & stuff (the irony …duh). I suddenly remember agreeing to re-join as an Intern in DesignQube, Chennai for I was pretty much a resting blob at home after the finals.

How it all started?

Ragupathi has been a Tech Mentor & a good friend of mine since my second year of Uni. He has been my go-to-person in all of my internships. I still remember my first day in GUVI, with my first task being told to create an event poster. I was dumb enough to do it with Picasa and double-dumb to show it to him. Oh my! The look on his face though. He calmly told me to try it out in Photoshop & It came out great later. This was roughly 3 years ago. I did the second term of my internship at DesignQube in 2018 as well. It was pretty great and went on for roughly 2 months. The patience he & Nandhini show in explaining things & clearing out my doubts … Well, that’s something I need to learn. This time the third term, I readily agreed as I had enough number of days being a couch potato. I really thought this would help me out to make some use of all the free time I had.

It’s been around three months since I started my third term of internship on Jan 2019. I am gearing up myself to work as a designated IT Team employee for DesignQube from May 2019 onwards. It has been pretty challenging and entertaining working here.

The DesignQube Routine

Everyday work starts around 10.30 am where I boot up my system, check whether DQ Products(Home Site & App Site) are running good, check for new support tickets & plan out the work to be completed for that day. Around 11.00 am we have a stand-up meeting where we discuss the previous day’s completed work & today’s work to be done. It helps the team to grasp the ongoing work for the day. After the meeting, it’s time for some Masala Chai & some IPL chat (Go CSK ! :D). The lunching starts right around at 2.30 & goes on till 3.00 to 3.30 pm. A nice cup of horlicks at 4.00 pm and the work pans out till 7.30 pm or 8.30 or even much late depending on the list of bugs, and then we bid adieu.

Peeps at DesignQube

Ragupathi helps you get off the work wagon at times with his thought-provoking questions which might make you wonder if he is an Illuminati. Don’t worry … I am pretty positive that he is … xD. My next go-to-person is Nandhini (aka) “The Bug Eliminator”. Not a single day goes off without me pestering her with a tech doubt. The Chai sessions with Vijay, Sakthi & Venkat after Stand-up meeting begins with head nods and ends with laughing puns about how Sakthi goes off to his home almost every weekend. In whatever mood you are when you reach the office the way Selvam smiles at you when you get out of the elevator will make you smile too. A charmful place indeed.

The unset lunching hours with the team can get over within 30 minutes with little words at times or can wrap up 60 minutes of eating and intellectual talks covering politics, current affairs, books, twitter trends & history. The Chai Bhai comes in around the right time every day in the evening with his blissful Horlicks that fills the workspace with a pleasant aroma and helps you get through your work till the end of the day.

Code Review

Code Reviews on Thursday’s (Don’t get intimidated by it very soon *sad smile*) will make me question my life choices as well as career choices in Software Development. The more you nod during the code review, the higher the chances of survival. But it has its own perks as well. The things you face during each code review will stop you from making a certain mistake again in the future and increases your problem-solving capabilities.

DevFest’ 2019 (Hackathon)

We planned a one-day hackathon named DevFest’ 19 in March. The main goal of this event is to design, develop & deploy a product in a single day. All the devs get together and code all day & night to publish a new product within a single day. Our team stayed a night at the office the previous night to make some preparations for the hackathon. We enjoyed an amazing buffet dinner that night and started coding, worked late till night & had great fun. It went on till 12.30 am & we all went to sleep on different floors in the office. Next day we started early at 8.00 am .. had our breakfast and started the one-day hackathon. Vijay was like a coding machine. Hope to be that fluent in programming some day. The hackathon went on till 8.00 PM that day. It felt really cool being a part of this event.

For a guy like me who never cared to code even during semester practicals, coding for a whole day felt surprisingly good.

It was one hell of experience though. Eagerly waiting for the next one-day hackathon. This event helped us to create DQ Ideas, a chrome extension which allows DQ Employees to share their ideas & collaborate with their teams on a daily basis. This has a great futuristic potential to turn out into an Internal Social Application for DesignQube.

It has been a pacy three months already & I’ve learned and enjoyed a lot during this Internship. Looking forward to the exciting work life at DesignQube. Thanks for reading.

Ravindran R

Arun Karthik N