A Developer Pod Is Born - Training Day 1, A Tiring Success

For those who might not know, Ranvir and I have been in New Delhi for the last few days, preparing to launch the Blue Whale Labs New Delhi office. There are some incriminating party pictures from our launch party that will hopefully never see the light of day, but that’s for an entirely different post.

Meanwhile, back at the office, we’ve been running around like mad. As a first-time visitor to India, I’ve had all sorts of things to get used to. The one consistent part of my life, however, is the increasingly chaotic pace of work. Though we’re close to 14 hours behind our friends, family, and loved ones, you wouldn’t know it. We’ve been burning the candle from both ends for the last 3 days straight.

Today, the first Developer Pod (each class of recruits) entered the Aquarium (our New Delhi office). There’s something very exciting about a new group of energetic, excited, and undoubtedly nervous developers preparing to try something new. And new it is, indeed. As might be expected, Blue Whale has its own way of thinking about application design and development. In many ways, we’re quite outside the norm for traditional software development in India and there’s a mild learning curve to get inside the process.

To address our needs and expectations, we’ve come up with a two week training regiment that provides the electricity required to jump start the mind. Our training regiment takes two weeks to complete and months to master - it’s thoughtful, challenging, and iterative.  It breaks down into 2 weeks:

• Week 1 - Learning how to design social web applications (we cover the entire social tool landscape, the basics of html and css design, and the basics of javascript and AJAX)
  
  
  
• Week 2 - Learning how to build social web applications (we cover the Ruby programming language and its excellent ally, the Ruby on Rails framework)
  

Ranvir and I are here for Week 1 and the first couple of days from Week 2.  We’re doing most of the training ourselves this week with support from Manish, our talented and over-worked manager of operations here.  Next week, we’ve lined up one of the foremost authorities on Ruby and Rails to give an intensive introduction to Ruby and Rails.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this training is that we are developing, from scratch, a brand new application that we’ve been discussing internally for the last few months.  It’s not only nice to see that come to life but also to see the team sponging up all the knowledge.

technorati tags:bluewhalelabs, developer+pod, greg+narain, ranvir+gujral, manish+sonkar, new+delhi

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Startup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.