A year in the life of a Javascript newbie

Pranav Pandey
The GeekyAnts Blog
Published in
3 min readJun 14, 2017

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On the 27th of this month, I’ll be completing a year at GeekyAnts, a web and mobile startup based out of Bangalore, India. I’ll try to summarize my experience in this post hoping that more of our country’s workforce realize the importance of creating.

When I graduated from a Tier 3 college in Bangalore, I had an offer from a huge IT giant in India in hand. If I had learnt anything from dabbling in new technologies over the last couple of years of my undergrad, the one thing that stood out was the need to see what I code. It was imperative for me to be valued, most of all by myself. Tags and labels of big companies rarely matter, but good solid in-your-face work will always be a cornerstone of your contribution in the IT industry. In addition to that, I had no plans of sitting on the “Indian bench”, which was a pretty big possibility, right after my first year of graduation.

So, after a basic aptitude assessment and uncompromising 4 rounds of technical interviews, I joined GeekyAnts when the workforce here was around 30. I soon realized that my work is going to be almost completely in Javascript and I didn’t know jack shit about it. So I set about learning the nuances of JS for the first 3 weeks and then heard about React Native. My first project was going to be with React Native and I sat down staring at the official docs, and once again, didn’t know shit.

I felt exactly like that dude on the right.

React Native was at 0.29 I think when I first looked it up and it has grown immensely in the last year, with a huge number of third party modules popping up to support it. It has grown, with me, to 0.45 now and it has been a fruitful journey. I realized a few things —

  1. No matter how good a library/framework is, good old JavaScript mastering will prove to be a very useful skill if you want to use these libraries to their full potential.
  2. Code refactoring at a later stage in a big application can prove to be a mammoth task, so take your time and think your project through. Have a good long vision.
  3. Try to use stable third party dependencies in your project who you think will provide updates with new versions. You’ll realize the importance of it when you upgrade your react-native version in the project 10 months down the line and all hell breaks loose.
  4. Adapt. If Redux is not working out for you, try Mobx. If Mobx doesn’t work out, find something else or fall back on Redux and try to improve its usage in your project. Stagnation is not an option in the open-source environment.
  5. Write. It doesn’t matter if you have a good aptitude for sentence formation or not, but jot down what you do and share it. It clears up the ideas in your brain, and can potentially help others diving into the field as well. I’ve lost track of the number of articles I read and how many people I hugged in my mind for helping me out.

Looking back, I couldn’t be happier about my decision to join an emerging startup instead of a big sluggish IT giant. We’re 60+ in strength now and I’ve met a lot of talented people here at GeekyAnts and in the React Native meetups that we keep organizing and it reiterates my belief in the growth of the open source ecosystem here in India. I’m grateful to far too many people to mention here, but most of all, I hope that the future me will look back and thank his younger self for taking the dive into the unknown.

Do take that dive, the waters are refreshing!

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