I started my job last year in July as a search engineer in a major Indian e-commerce company straight out of college and was really glad to be able to work using one of the most beautiful tech stacks I've seen - Golang microservices talking to Apache Solr, Redis and a little bit of MySQL/Mongo connected to the external world through RabbitMQ.

I learnt writing good abstractions, organising code, the value of commenting the WHYs instead of the WHATs. I learnt about the amazing power of Redis wire protocol for mass insertions (reducing a 6 hour data import job to under 10 minutes using nothing but a CSV file and 4 lines of sed).

I also learnt a lot about debugging systems. Trying to find the root cause, fixing it and creating processes to prevent it from repeating.

I also got to work on a few hacky one-off solutions for scaling a legacy PHP monolith by redirecting all Memcache calls to a PHP class file which is basically a dump of all the Memcache data. I was overjoyed once I saw our legacy stack able to sustain over 6k orders per minute whereas it crumbled at around 1200 orders per minute earlier.

I also got to debug issues arising due to saturated network switches across two floors in our colocation DC.

All in all a great year.

I also saw how it feels to be laid off due to restructuring after a merger (with Walmart) after having worked tirelessly for the company and learnt how important it is to have a support system. I'm glad my amazing peers could arrange over 20 interviews for me within two weeks and I was back on a new job. I was also glad for the amazing severance pay that the organisation gave me.

I am glad for my first job, my first professional circle and all the learning that it gave me.