Helpfresher Story 02: Hi everyone, here we have Shanmukha Surya Teja from DigitalTeach.in.
We are trying share the Success Stories of an Employee which will inspire you.
This time, we got Shanmukha Surya Teja who is a super talented employee from Code and Pixels Interactive Technologies Pvt. Ltd as a Full Stack Developer.
Let’s get into his story now.
Before we start anything else, can you express yourself in a few lines?
My name is Shanmukha Surya Teja and I work as a Full Stack Engineer at Code and Pixels Interactive Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
My firm deals with creating digitalized learning experiences for school and university students.
Apart from this, I manage and maintain variants of IETM software which is an electronic documentation framework to provide secure access to highly sensitive and confidential technical manuals to military personnel.
It’s good to share about me with Helpfresher Story Series today.
That’s great Surya! Good to know about you briefly.
What was your actual goal after graduation?
I’ve always wanted to be a software engineer working in one of the FAANG companies. My fascination with computer science and programming from a very young age has molded me to be a great problem solver and seeker of new challenges.
Programming has always been a challenging and fascinating experience for me. After college.
I started out as a freelancer and worked a few gigs for friends but it was getting clear to me that I needed to improve my skillset so I can offer more services.
Apart from this, being the elder son at home, I had responsibilities to fulfill and so I had to wrap up my freelancing activities and begin working at Amazon in the customer support division.
Skills OR Graduation, which is an important factor for a student?
It’s a bit trickier to answer this. I always chose skills to be superior to graduation. Experts say there’s an increase in college graduates every year but fewer job opportunities so having the right skills is essential to survive.
But now, after having a taste for both self-employment as well as joining a startup, I would say graduation takes priority.
Helpfresher Story 01: Surya Teja From DigitalTeach.in
Graduation is a long-term investment as it’ll help with the quality of life improvements such as getting a raise, starting new roles, or applying for FAANG companies.
On the other hand, one’s skill set determines how efficient they are at work – like respecting project deadlines, writing better code, etc.
The way I see it now, they both go hand-in-hand, your skills take you to newer heights and graduation sets up the platform for you to showcase your skills.
That’s true Shanmukha Surya Teja, well said!
What is your first job after graduation? Did the job help your monthly expenses or career growth?
My first gig was for a friend as part of my freelance gig. My first gig didn’t feature a huge paycheque but it gave me an opportunity to send a gift to my mother which is one of my best accomplishments to date.
My actual first freelance gig was with a stranger I met on freelancer.com for his Android app project.
It took me about a week to prototype all features and another 2 weeks to tie in bells and whistles for completion.
On both occasions, these gigs helped me with monthly expenses to an extent.
Will your current job profile fill your dreams?
I love what I’m doing right now, everyday I spend more than 9 hours finding answers to trivial problems in hopes of writing quality code that I can look back to fondly.
It gives me a sense of satisfaction and hope for the next day on the work I do each day.
I am proud of the path I’ve chosen and fight for each day and as a citizen, I feel honored for being able to contribute to its sovereignty and security.
What do you like most? Working in MNC OR Self Employment
I prefer working in an MNC as I was a freelance software developer in the past stacked by upcoming projects on the horizon but I had responsibilities then.
I wrapped it up as soon as possible and left the self-employment scene.
Working in a company gives you fewer things to worry about and I get to work most of the time in solving engineering problems than meeting clients or clearing out dues.
I might go back to it one day, but right now, I love what I’m doing and I would let it continue for the foreseeable future.
How many technologies do you know so far? What are they?
In programming, it doesn’t matter what “technologies” we know as they will fade away and be replaced by another shiny new thing.
For example, a few years back Docker was the way to fixing project dependencies without messing with your OS. These days, I see Kubernetes taking that role.
I also see stuff like PHP be sidelined giving way to JavaScript bridging gaps between desktop “native” apps and web apps.
I know quite a few buzzword programming languages.
I have worked with Python, Java, Kotlin, JavaScript, C#, TypeScript, and PHP projects ranging from desktop applications, mobile apps to web apps.
At work, I build web apps with Angular and NodeJS. I have recently started exploring Rust and WebAssembly in my free time.
Rust is a memory-safe systems-level programming language introduced by Mozilla that has evolved into a separate entity by the community.
My interest in WebAssembly seeking to search for performance improvements in the internal tools in my company.
Do you support using third-party resources on a project? Would you rather build the features by yourself?
I use third-party plugins whenever needed both at work and on my personal projects. I have also been contributing to such open-source, third-party projects in my free time for over a year now.
It makes me happy that I can provide solutions to problems I faced right at the source. As a developer, I use several open source packages for my projects.
The idea that one wouldn’t necessarily need to maintain a piece of code which isn’t quality tested or had any sort of security analysis done on it is frightening to me.
By using open-source libraries in a project, a developer can focus on working on their project where certain aspects of the project need not be re-implemented from scratch.
The open-source libraries take care of handling their tasks for us with high-grade code.
All websites use external resources like jQuery and its plugins or integrate npm packages for improving user experience.
The safety aspect of open-source is that, at any point in time, you can look at the source code of a particular tool and learn how it does what it does and maybe improve it.
Hence, I do not reimplement features whenever possible as it can save a lot of time and effort that can be put into different aspects of the project.
What piece of advice would you give to college graduates who want to get started in opensource?
I contribute to such open-source packages in my free-time. As a student, the best way to get started in open-source is to pick a project – any project you would like to build yourself.
Then start learning and building prototypes of its individual functionalities.
After all, prototypes behave correctly, you can get started in merging them together to build the project you wished for!
And during this time, you’ll come across various external plugins that might need a tweak to get it just right.
Look it up on Google and find the source code. Go through it and maybe you can understand it better and make changes to it so that someone like you can make use of it, improve it and the cycle goes on!
What do you think are the best ways to save money as fresher with their first job?
I would recommend looking into fixed and recursive deposits initially to save money. They are the quickest way to securing money for when they need.
After sometime, you can look into other streams such as mutual funds to invest your money for better returns.
Saving money in a deposit account yields lower returns in my opinion which, when placed correctly, can improve with mutual funds.
As a beginner, it is good practice to invest a higher percentage in debt-based funds which associate with low risk.
The returns on equity-based mutual funds are tied to the stock market which is known to yield better returns for invested capital but also has higher risk value compared to debt-based mutual funds.
I would highly recommend doing your own research before taking any action.
Social media links:
| GitHub | https://github.com/shanmukhateja |
| https://twitter.com/shanmukhateja94 | |
| Blog | https://surya-dev-journey.hashnode.dev/ |
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/surya-teja-karra-240170159/ |
Thank you for sharing my story.
Signing off,
– Shanmukha Surya Teja
meletika 