During the Christmas holidays in 2017, I had some free time. I was looking to learn about Relay. There are not much Relay courses. But I found a good video course from Packt. And the course was authored by Divyendu Singh. I connected with Divyendu on Twitter. He is not only a great developer but a good person to know. So, I asked him if I could interview him for my blog. And he obliged.
Interview with Divyendu Singh
Q: Tell us a bit about your developer journey.
I started programming when I was around 12. My brother was doing a C++ course and had Visual Basic 6 in the school curriculum. I saw his code while waiting to play games in our common PC. I fell in love with Visual Basic and started making some tiny apps like football predictor, 2D Golf and more.
A few years went by. And I made my first inventory management system for Carzz (Car shop software). It was a school project and this was a ton of learning.
After that, I went to college (SMVDU, Jammu) and studied Computer Science. I started freelancing during college and it was fun. Few of my clients turned to be my friends as well. And we are still in touch. During college, I made a ton of side-projects like “The Red Devil” – a Manchester United score and news app. This app got me freelancing opportunities and served as a major project for many of my college juniors. I also worked on GlideIdea.com, a science blog based on WordPress. Eventually, I sold this domain. And it was my first little profitable venture.
Freelancing was going strong but I had a chance to join TCS. It would be good to get some industry experience. After a one year stint, I decided that corporate culture was not for me. At this
moment, I planned on quitting and going home to try and set up a freelancing shop, however, I ran into a job post by Sportskeeda. Wow, this was a dream job, very small team, scale, tech, sports.
Sportskeeda was the real learning experience for me. I worked there for slightly more than 3 years and worked with an awesome team to build products. A major chunk of my practical learnings about product development has come during my time at Sportskeeda. But all good (in this case great) things come to an end and I understand that to learn and grow you have to take risks. I quit my awesome job at Sportskeeda (31st Jan 2018 was my last date) to (yes, you guessed it right) try and set up a full-time freelancing shop (or maybe the “right opportunity”).
Freelancing shop: I am currently figuring out the procedures and processes to make that happen for me. It is a work in progress. I have a lot of exposure and idea of how it should be like, I am working on the execution part. Vision Without Execution Is Just Hallucination.
Q: Do you have any advice for a developer from India.
Do side-projects and contribute to open-source.
Learn the fundamentals and basics.
Be humble and helpful while interacting with the community, don’t be entitled.
Read books like Pragmatic Programmer, Rework, Passionate Programmer, Refactoring etc.
Read blogs like Joel on software and Coding Horror.
India is relatively much cheaper. If you have much more risk-taking capacity than many developed / developing countries. Get society and social pressure out of the way and be brave, take risks and grow. Oh my, I can do a rant on this separately but I will stop here. Organize yourself and execute, like I have a self-improvement Trello board. I am not saying that you should have a similar board or anything but make an improvement process for yourself that works for you.
I think most of the advice is generic and applies to all developers.
Q: What are your views about product development?
Well, this is a very broad question. Let me give answering this one a shot. I would say that all successful products have one thing in common and that is “value creation”. They provide value to the user in one form or the other. Now, this can be saving users time by automation of some task or by delivering goods to their home so that they don’t have to go to a retail store or a to-do
list to organize their life better or something else. A product can have bugs or it can be a work in progress and still provide value.
Today’s apps are going south in terms of user satisfaction. A lot of apps try you keep you engaged in the platform by giving you little wins in form of notification and
engagement but causing long-term unhappiness (for example, Facebook). While the correct value is that user should be done with your app in minimum time and pay you for saving their time.
I find Rework and “Joel on Software” as an excellent resource for product development.
Q: Which products/frameworks do you like to work on?
For the most part of my career, I have been language/framework agnostic. These days I am working on React, React Native, Node, GraphQL (Relay, Apollo
etc) and Next.js. I also embrace the concepts of functional programming. On my list are Scala, ReasonML, and Rust but this list changes frequently.
Some of my favorite products are zeit.co, Fullstory.com, codesandbox.io, graph.cool, Expo, Auth0, Cloudflare, Let’s encrypt, Serverless Framework.
Of course, I am not including the common ones like Trello, GitHub, and StackOverflow.
Q: Tell us a little bit of your personal life
Apart from coding, I love (not in order) playing (physically and PlayStation) and watching football (Manchester United fan). Other things that I like are cooking, reading books (various genres – I read about 24+ books a year), running, cycling, swimming – my progress would be 0.001% but someday I would love to do the Iron Man and beyond.
I am learning new languages (spoken). Currently, I am on a 180+ day streak learning German. I keep aggressive targets for self-improvement. And I love coffee.
I am not on most social platforms (just Twitter) and none of Facebook platforms as they don’t provide value to me.
I am from Jammu and Kashmir which is a beautiful place.
Website: Divyendu Singh.
Recently, he hosted an AMA about his video course where you can find more information about him.
Divyendu also writes a lot on his blog. He has shared his views on writing effective software. A few more articles on his blog which are great reads are:
Thanks to Divyendu Singh for sharing his views on my blog.
