After being through two startups (story for another time), I got an opportunity (way back in 2012) to work in a more traditional American company, one with a different business model than software development.
UL (Underwriters Laboratories) is a trusted product safety certification corporation. It is wildly profitable (around $4 billion in revenues in 2012) and completely private.
The business pitch was to create an online marketplace of UL certified products. Eventually, use marketplace popularity to fuel more demand into the certification business.
This was my first opportunity to try to build new skills for a pure software engineer/ programmer: developer operator (devops). The IT group in UL were old school, and not really set up for building and or managing modern software development and production environments.
I was the first hire from our CTO, Stanford, and was able to build a new team rather quickly (even surprising myself!). Some folks were past colleagues, and that helped tremendously.
I had previously used vagrant by Hashicorp, and was well aware of setting up virtual machines in a development laptop. However, doing the same in a “public cloud” was totally new territory. I lucked out with hiring Utkarsh, a backend engineer who had prior experience of working with chef and nagios. Our open source cloud solution ultimately became a java technology stack on AWS, with cassandra as a NoSQL database, and elastic as the search engine.
In the two or so years I spent in UL, I had a blast building solutions from scratch alongside a motivated, talented, and skilled team. We had loads of fun together, trusted each other, and I have many fond memories of that time. Like for instance, when we tried finishing up a production deploy on a Saturday, and ordered food from madras cafe!
Stanford is very generous boss, and we had Indian snacks available on tap all the time, which the team & I enjoyed! Celebrating festivals like Diwali became part of our culture; I still carry with me a small statue of Lord Ganesha, that Pankaj, our backend engineer gifted to all of us.
Working on new frameworks like reactjs was challenging and fun. We luckily had Aparna who could whip up amazing web pages on a whim.
Gaurav, Laxmana, Mahesh, Srikanth are amazing and excellent java backend engineers and crafted top notch APIs. The team working well together, launched the Clearview marketplace within an year! This amazing cast were supported by Naga, our QA engineer, and Gokul, our database engineer.
Working in a private company has its challenges, like being on a profit sharing plan, instead of a straight up equity plan.
I am fortunate to have been part of this talented team, and grateful to all the people.