By Marcos Ocasio, CTO & Head of Engineering at Caravel Labs

Today we talk to one of our Software Engineers, Meghna Bharadwaj about her experience joining and working at Caravel Labs. Meghna joined Caravel Labs in 2020 right after graduating college and since then has consistently delivered quality software for our customers. Our hope is to inspire more emerging Software Engineers to join our growing team.

Marcos: Meghna, thanks for taking the time to talk to me about your experience at Caravel Labs. Please tell us, how was your experience joining Caravel Labs?  

Meghna: I initially started at Caravel Labs in 2020 as an intern on the Caravel Labs Sunrise Internship Program. Now that I think about it, it was very special for both me and Caravel Labs because it was my first software consulting internship, and it was their first internship program after the company had been formed. I worked for six months after which I was offered a full-time employee position and I have been a part of Caravel Labs ever since. 

Marcos: It was great to have you at our internship program, your passion for technology and learning convinced us you would be a great addition to our team. I hope Caravel Labs has met your expectations, what do you like about Caravel Labs? 

Meghna: The list is long to be honest. I started working in Caravel Labs when I was inexperienced and had little to no knowledge of software consulting. My mentors at Caravel Labs have not only been very supportive but they have been helpful and patient with me throughout. I feel the environment is not just about work, but the culture is very important. At Caravel Labs I feel we don't grow to be just developers, but we also experience a holistic growth and learn that "doing good" is what is expected of everyone and the chosen medium in our case is technology. It’s a very wholesome work environment to be in. 

Marcos: Glad to hear your experience has been positive and that you have experienced our focus on building a generative culture.  What’s your typical day like at Caravel Labs? 

Meghna: I really like that the work hours are flexible. A lot of people said that it would be difficult to work with a team half-way across the world, but I have found how important time management is to make it work. I keep my learning or development work in the afternoon hours so that I am attending meetings during the evening. This gives me the flexibility to wake up according to my preferred time (I have never been an early morning person!) and maintain my sleep schedule. Secondly, working long hours seems to be very common in the development industry, so I was worried about this. However, Caravel Labs always acknowledges the fact that you are a person who might have other commitments and respects that. I am given the flexibility to manage my time, in case of delays we let the team know. The best part about the team is that they would cover for you in case you need to step back. 

Marcos: Yes, we aim to empower our team members to manage their own time and recognize that to do that we need to provide you a supportive team environment. Would you share some highlights of your work at Caravel Labs? 

Meghna: The best thing about working here is we get to work on a variety of tech stacks as required by the clients’ needs. Every few months we have new projects with new requirements and technologies that we need to learn and implement. Each project comes with very diverse set of pain-points and problems, each very different from the previous one and every project has a huge social impact. There is hardly ever a mundane day at work. 

Marcos: I agree that constant learning and growth is a good motivator, especially in our field where new technology stacks seem to show up every month! Thinking about the future, which aspects of the job are you excited about? Which are you worried about? 

Meghna: The part I think that excites me most is working as a global team. The team has members from all over the globe. I have got to know how peculiarly similar a lot of our traditions are and sometimes terribly different. This was initially a challenge because communication is key. But you learn in no time how interesting it is to work with other developers who come from not only a different background than you but sometimes a different age of technology altogether. 

Work at Caravel Labs is not a typical 9 to 5 job and hence it is always a point of concern when it is different from the norm that we have been following in most of the World. It is a flexible job, not an easy one. It has its own trials, for example, it is difficult to work from home over a computer, but this gives you the liberty to choose your work location and your working time baring a few meetings. It is new but with the support of a very strong team of experienced developers and the coding standards and quality of work is very high. So initially it may seem difficult but with all the help I have got and quite a few newbie mess-ups that I have learned from I have become a better developer. 

Marcos: Thank you again for talking to me today. One last question: almost two years working with us, how has your view of Software Engineering changed from when you graduated college? 

Meghna: In college, it is always about delivering a project no matter what or how, but this statement is very far from how we work at Caravel Labs. The first difference is the validity of a product and its User Experience. In my college projects I never had to answer the question, who are we helping with this project or whether this would help them at all. This is probably the first and most important consideration that many software developers ignore. Secondly, simply copying and pasting code from StackOverflow and compiling successfully does not make for a working solution. A lot of effort goes into designing a scalable and reusable codebase that is easy to read and less cumbersome to maintain in the future. A lot of planning also goes into the distribution of work to ensure that developers have all the information they need to complete their work. Finally, testing plays a huge role too, I never had to do automated unit testing in college or even consider many test scenarios. It's a whole new world from the world we left in college!