On working at SDSLabs(1)

The SDSLabs homepage carries a nice “Goes Recruiting” ribbon near the top bar this week. Clicking the overlaid image shows you the detailed recruitment poster. As the first years ready themselves for the recruitment process, I thought it fit to write about the work, culture and work-culture of our lab, located on the right wing (no pun intended) of the hobbies club.

From the small, clumsy room that once was near the Cogni office, Hobbies Club, SDSLabs, with Shobhit Sir to guide, has come a long way, in an admirably short span of one year.

The Work

The best part, doubtless, is that you get to work on anything that captures your fancy. As newbies, we were first introduced to each of the projects that were then underway and that you now can see, on the homepage and asked to choose. Nothing is appreciated better than having your own project ideas, in which case everyone in the team devotes their time for them(the ideas) to achieve fruition. We believe in an open, “no-rules” environment to enhance productivity.

yes, everything you say is swell, but what is it that you do?

What work and how

Broadly, Web development. More broadly, mobile and web development and Design. In the process, however, the work fans out to different areas. The lab is never the pressure pan with little leeway for errors, nor does it stagnate and radiate leisure. On one day, everyone is coding away, while simultaneously enjoying “yerushalayim shel zahav” on surround speakers and on another we are all playing “crux”, the IEEE online treasure hunt.

Another ordinary day ends in a few people pulling off an all-nighter with some issues filed up in redmine (PMS), as the agenda. Development Marathons with coffee-breaks, tons of geek-speak and the normal banter, several lectures and the perpetual availability of workplace mentors make you learn a lot of things that is hard to come by,when you are on your own.

Echo

Echo, the brainchild of Ishan Sir(CS 2006-10 Batch) started developing first in java, over one year ago. People at SDSLabs could be the subject of a separate post, and without digressing much here, I would say that Ishan Sir is one among those I will always be honoured to have known. The first version of Echo that you see, on the home page has a backend written in scala and uses some of the very latest from the world of web technologies. And even as of now,many ideas are still in the process of gestation.

Echo is actually a recursive acronym in which Creed(C) is the recommendation engine, H(Hash) and O(onyx) are the names of the hashed storage on a dfs and the indexer and searcher, respectively. I joined team Echo soon after recruitment in the second semester and have seen its development since. Almost all of it, including refactoring, was done by Ishan Sir and Neeraj, and most of it in November last year and I, for one, managed to learn a thing or two.

There is an awful lot to learn when you delve deep into anything and the web/computers/technology is no exception. In the jump from java to scala, in the addition of sinatra as the middleware, in using lucene and reading up clustering algorithms, I was taught, some of it in vain, about efficient programming practices, a little about scalable architecture, natural language processing and of course, other things like using github and hordes of other open source software.

Finally, Why

The point is that, every visit to the lab, teaches you one thing or the other. With the likes of Abhay around, there is a continuous passing-on of a range of diverse information, in a way you would like and appreciate. Just eavesdropping on nerdy exchanges will teach you how to set a proxy on the terminal or how to run parallels on a mac, what to expect from windows 8, which is the best editor and for what, what Linus Torvalds does on github and such like.

Are you game?

If you are in your first year and do value this kind of a learning experience, do participate in the recruitment process, because at SDSLabs, you get to:

• have fun coding and ask geeks for help, when stuck.
• receive tech updates for free!
• learn how stuff works ,in a free environment
• think on the white board,watch webinars on a big plasma screen and look at a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull for inspiration.
• play with cruft like old monitors and motherboards, to make useful things like skynet and much more!

To get started, visit https://sdslabs.co.in/recruit/.

Nisha C ,Second Year,Mech