How I got into HasGeek Crew

Background about me

I am kracekumar, graduated from Amrita school of Engineering, Coimbatore in B.Tech IT (2007-2011). I am working with IBM India Pvt Ltd, Bangalore as Associate System Engineer from 14th July, 2011 til 16th July, 2012.(C# developer but never wrote single line of code in c# in IBM).

I am GNU/Linux user for 3 years and developed application in PHP, Rails, Flask(all are hobby projects).

Scene

I was not happy with job at IBM and I had training bond for one year(14th July, 2011 to 13th July 2012), decided to resign from my job once bond period is over whether I have new job offer or not. I usually look for job posting in Hasgeek job board from time to time. I was very interested to work in Linux, Python or Rails and wasn’t interested in Java or C# or Windows Technology.

I tweeted on 13th May

Seems like I couldn’t find out cool python company in india #sad.

Following are the replies I received in order (Ascending order of replies in twitter)

Mehul Ved ‏@mehulved

@kracetheking define cool python company? Maybe @versesane or @Sengupta can help. They have done some research on such companies.

kracekumar ‏@kracetheking

@mehulved: Cool means geeky ppl who care for every line code of code. @versesane @Sengupta

Mehul Ved ‏@mehulved

@kracetheking what about @Instamojo where @Sengupta and @hiway work? @versesane

James Dennis ‏@j2labs

@kracetheking Have you met @sid_chilling ? He’s even a Brubeck user!

Ankur Gupta ‏@versesane

@kracetheking @mehulved @Sengupta bangalore has lot of good work in python happening …

Ankur Gupta ‏@versesane

@kracetheking @mehulved @Sengupta best way to accumulate list of companies is to see archived list of opening on http://simplyhired.co.in

kracekumar ‏@kracetheking

@versesane @mehulved @Sengupta :I always search in hasgeek jobs but they want people who know python, but want to code in php.

Ankur Gupta ‏@versesane

@kracetheking @mehulved @Sengupta well how many years of professional work ex do you have or what softwares have you worked on that ppl use

kracekumar ‏@kracetheking

@j2labs: I have meet @sunil during pycon india, 2011 who works along with @sid_chilling,that time I haven’t discovered brubeck. thanks!

sid_chilling ‏@sid_chilling

@kracetheking good to meet you. do contact me or @sunil when you come to our city. would love to meet. thanks @j2labs

Kiran Jonnalagadda ‏@jackerhack

@kracetheking We don’t advertise, but we could do with Python skills on board to

Kiran is the founder of hasgeek

kracekumar ‏@kracetheking

@versesane : Thanks for those links. /cc @mehulved @Sengupta

Ankur Gupta ‏@versesane

@kracetheking i can introduce u to some hiring managers let us talk over email versesane at gmail

All the above conversation happened on 13th May 2012.

On 14th May 2012

kracekumar ‏@kracetheking

@jackerhack : When can we have the talk ?

Kiran Jonnalagadda ‏@jackerhack

@kracetheking I’m out of town this week. Can talk on IRC though. I’m jace in irc://irc.freenode.net/#hasgeek.

Then

Myself and Kiran had conversation in IRC and kiran revealed hiring policy for hasgeek is contribute to hasgeek codebase and if it is ok you are hired. I agreed to the deal.

Contributing to Hasgeek Codebase

From 14th May 2012 to 18th May 2012 I worked on Hasgeek Tv, My contribution here. Most of the code was already completed by kiran, but there were few incomplete pieces which I completed.

On 21st May 2012, kiran and me decided we will meet on 22nd May 2012 in CIS(Center for Internet Society). On 22nd May I was half an hour late to the place. Then Kiran, Siddarth and me had discussion(not an interview) about each other. Kiran and siddarth informed me that they are working on new project Hacknight for which they want me to contribute and depending on the outcome in three weeks, I might be hired.

Journey

It was Kiran, Siddarth, Sajjad and I who worked on hacknight. The code is Here. I worked on hacknight code in evening after coming from office and saturday in CIS. Most of our discussion was carried out in CIS(Hasgeek office ) , IRC, Github.

I had initial learning curve looking into other hasgeek libraries like Coaster, Baseframe, Lastuser, Peopleflow. Thanks for Kiran, Siddarth, Sajjad who answered all my silly doubts and helped to get started.

My mistakes

I broke the code twice. Both were due to improper tests.

<a href="https://github.com/hasgeek/baseframe/commit/43f08689017bb1e0dfeb4f9e7e5d4efc47e6af8d" target="_blank">Baseframe broken code</a>

<a href="https://github.com/hasgeek/hacknight/issues/42" target="_blank">Hacknight code which I broke</a>

Climax

On 7th June, 2012 Kiran informed hasgeek is happy to hire me after final talk on 9th June, 2012. All went well, I informed I am happy to join Hasgeek. I will be joining hasgeek on 17th July, 2012.

Finally if you have read so far you should probably look into Hacknight Beta Version and feel free to speak to me in Twitter.

Thanks

Thanks a ton to following people who setup the entire atmosphere

-[mehulved](https://twitter.com/#!/mehulved)
-[versesane](https://twitter.com/#!/versesane)
-[Sengupta](https://twitter.com/#!/Sengupta)
-[j2labs](https://twitter.com/#!/j2labs)
-[sid_chilling](https://twitter.com/#!/sid_chilling)