Awesome. Security. Advice.
I am excited to share my Appsecco journey of the first three months as a full-time employee. How it went, what I learned, the new friends I made, the fun activities we have on Fridays, Hackathons, and a lot more.
I first time interacted with the Appsecco team at Nullcon international conference 2020. I met Akash Mahajan at the networking party of Nullcon and asked that I am willing to do an internship at Appsecco. He asked me to drop a mail about the same then we will see to it. Then after I came back from Goa I had a conversation with Akash Mahajan on LinkedIn. He said if you are willing to learn about DevSecOps drop mail to Sunesh Govindaraj, the DevSecOps team lead, and CC me.
So I mailed him about joining in the summer vacation. But due to COVID19, everything was disturbed. My college got closed, every day became a vacation, and online classes started. I received mail from Sunesh and he asked me to do an internship remotely. I thought I would not be able to learn much on a remote internship. You can say I lacked confidence in myself. I was doubtful, would I even be able to do a remote internship and learn similar to an on-site internship. Days passed and nothing was getting normal due to COVID19. In August I decided to join an internship remotely and face the challenges. It was a great decision I took and at the right time. The biggest challenge was my online university classes and exams which I had to manage alongside.
I asked Akash Mahajan as well as Sunesh Govindaraj what should I get prepared with before joining the internship. Akash asked me to read the book named Phoenix Project nothing else and Sunesh said Okay.. we do not expect you to know things for the internship, the internship would itself be a learning experience. Their replies gave me more confidence and made things easy for me.
I interned at Appsecco for three months. Where I worked on projects DevSecOps Pipeline Concepts and Cloud-Native Implementation of DevSecOps Concepts. It was a great learning experience by doing hands-on under the guidance of Akash Mahajan, Sunesh Govindaraj, and Ayush Priya.
On the last day of my internship, I was a little sad that the internship ended. The same day I got a call from Sunesh Govindaraj and he asked, do you want to join Appsecco as a full-time employee. I said Yes without any second thought and was all happy that I will again get a chance to work at Appsecco.
Finally, the day comes for my first day of the job, that is the day I joined 15th December 2020. I was happy as well as a little nervous but I was familiar with the team. First day we had an introduction, then some documentation work, and also I got some documentation to go through. Everyone welcomed me on the first day and it was wonderful starting.
In the team, everyone is helpful and supportive. Whenever I have some doubt, we get on a call and resolve it. In the last three months, I learned a lot starting from building pipelines, AWS, Elastic Cloud, and the list goes on. Sunesh Govindaraj explains really well whenever I or anyone else have a doubt. I learned a lot from Ayush Priya as well and he too guides me whenever I face any problems.
Akash Mahajan is a great mentor and always guides us. He motivates us to always keep learning new things which are out of our comfort zone whether it’s a life skill or technical stuff.
Sunesh explains to me on Miro the workflow with the help of a flowchart all things we are going to do one after the other. We also use Zoho Projects for setting milestones and the tasks under them. I mark it as ‘complete’ or in ‘progress’ according to the progress of the task. It helps in keeping track.
Daily, we have morning and evening sync-up calls to discuss tasks, what issues I am facing and what to do next. Sometimes if I am stuck then also we have a short call to explain how to proceed further.
In the starting, I used to think I am working a little slow And when I brought this with the team, then they told me that we at Appsecco follow this approach
Crawl, Walk, Run
Crawl means trying out a task first time and documenting it. Walk is the stage where we have to do the tasks multiple times following the documentation. Run is when we automate the task.
Lunch Meetings too are great and well spent in various talks and discussions among us. During covid times, these meetings help to communicate with each one and help us to stay connected. In between, we also have Riyaz sir jokes. We all have been doing work from home for a long time but it still feels we are not so far from each of us. This is only made possible due to Akash’s great efforts in making sure that we stay connected.
Because COVID-19 is not going to end sooner or later, Appsecco turned all Fridays into Fun and learning, and a holiday. First Friday of the month we have a holiday. The last Friday we have fun Fridays where we have various activities like quizzes and talent show. Along with it we also have our quiz master Riyaz Walikar prepares the quiz which everyone enjoys a lot. Shruthi Kamath, our “Customer Success Manager” somehow manages to find new games for us for lunches and Fridays apart from the great job she does. In mid-Fridays, we have a hackathon where everyone works and explores something new.
Another interesting activity we all had to do which is out of our comfort zone. I hardly dance so I danced the first time in front of the team. Other activities that were performed by my teammates are Ayush Priya presented a presentation about makeup. Sunesh Govindaraj who doesn’t know Hindi at all had to do five minutes of Hindi extempore. Kavisha Seth had to sing a song and Varun Bhatt gave us a lecture on ‘Quantum Computing and Cyber security’ It was cool.
At Appsecco the team’s health is also important and looked after. For this, we had Zumba and Yoga organized. Where the whole team did Zumba and yoga with our virtual trainers.
So this is my story of Appsecco starting from my internship till my first three months of my first job. My time at Appsecco till now has been full of knowledge and adventure. I have a lot to learn and grow and I know that I definitely have the best platform. My journey to Appsecco has been great and will be great further.
Thanks to Sunesh Govindaraj
Hate filling forms? We're quick to respond to emails and calls too.
