My normal day begins around 10.30 (but if I had a late night, I would probably get in at 11.30). On an average day at Hashnode, you can find us talking about a new feature or building a new feature or fixing bugs. I think my favourite part about working at Hashnode has to be how anyone in the team can bring about a change in the product or come up with a feature and have it shipped really fast. For instance, the hot discussion sidebar was made in less than a day. We also have a really less number of meetings compared to the other companies I've worked for and we almost operate on auto pilot. We all know what we're going to be working on the next day when we leave work. Another thing we actively do is to keep an eye on the all the questions, links and stories coming in and answer them, as and when we can and of course, moderate them as well. The day ideally ends around 6.30-7.00 in the evening, which is when we go home. Now, Hashnode has become a lot like Facebook for us, in fact we keep checking it every now and then even in the evenings and if we come up with something on the fly or see a bug, we tell each other about in on Slack and have a little discussion, there and then. Besides all the serious stuff, we do have a lot of banter going on throughout the day, our topics of discussion ranging from Donald Trump to House of Cards to Lord of the Rings.
I went to a school called Manipal Institute of Technology and studied computer science there. As a part of my final semester, I had to do an internship and that's how I got introduced to the software industry. I interned at this company called Altair Engineeing as an backend engineer and joined them as a full time employee, after graduating college. An year later, I moved to this CI/CD start-up called Shippable, and I think I wanted to figure out how the start-up ecosystem worked at that point. Fast forward a year later, I heard about Hashnode and it was love at first sight and here I'm today.
The tech scene is pretty active in Bangalore, you have tons of events (Meetups, Hackathons etc) about almost everything. Even outside of these events, most people I run into are engineers (in fact, both within my family and friends circle. Once, I wanted to get away from all the tech chaos and meet someone from outside the tech world and got on Tinder, but boom, I still met a backend engineer. The entire date was spent on a PHP VS NodeJS debate :D). So, the usual chatter is like "Hey, they raised X million dollars or hey, did you see that podcast". I sometimes do get annoyed of the fact that most people I run into are from the same industry as I'm, but, I think it's definitely nice to have so many smart people around.
I wouldn't use the word advice, since I'm figuring things out myself (and I don't think that's ever going to stop, Haha), but I can definitely talk about what has worked for me and if it could help some college kid out there, I would be really really happy. I think it's very important that you have to become a developer by choice. It shouldn't be something that's forced on you (like how it's the case usually in India). Once that's sorted out, just pick a stack of your choice and build something simple. Then, try to get an internship at a place where you think you'll get to work with smart people who can point you in the right direction. Then, you just convert that internship into a full time opportunity. Most importantly, never stop learning. Try to learn something new every week.
Thanks for sharing! It seems like a really positive scene to be a part of, I'm glad you've got so many people you can talk to about things you're interested in :)