My Journey with the Tech Stack ?? at Uzhavarbumi

Four years ago today, on 1/Jun/2019, I "officially" started a new freelance project. For us developers, the official start is when we make the first commit on Git! (It's like writing our first line of code for the project).

Every great endeavor has its share of challenges, and ours was no exception. We had begun this project a few months prior but encountered miscommunication & a lack of clarity on both sides in defining the PROBLEM:

1?? Efficiently Tracking Product Orders

2?? Effectively Monitoring Customer Transactions

So, How did I thrive at UB for FOUR years?

?? Went from working Remote to Relocating to the #Uzhavarbumi Factory

?? Learnt their entire Workflow & Process

?? Understood their Business & Touchpoints

?? Moved much closer to the Problem to DEFINE it!

?? Eventually became the CTO of the Organisation

Thus the solution was to create the following:

?? A Customer-facing Mobile Application

?? A Dealer-facing Mobile Application

?? An Admin Portal for Data Management (for Customer Support)

From a very humble beginning, unknowingly I was laying the foundation for a future #ERP system that has become an integral part of our daily operations. Within a month from the start of the project, we were ready to publish our Mobile Apps and have them be used. The first release went well, we had over 400 users download and signup for the app in the first few days.

With so many users, came unforeseen consequences:

?No collective knowledge of ALL users

?We cannot know what we don’t know :)

That was a BIG learning point!

Slowly we started adding more and more features to the app and more modules to our ERP system. I have rewritten our app's code base at least 3 times, once for an architecture upgrade and once for an overhaul of the UI, more minor rewrites of sub-systems still occur but are infrequent.

One of my biggest regrets is that I could have better architected our core modules with future scope in mind. One anecdote I can recall is, me calculating if #mysql will handle a mere 20 Lakh record of Milk deliveries in the next 10 years, this sounds silly to me now because we have zoomed past that point within 3 years.

But when making those decisions, the module's scope was very small, it seemed enough and fulfilled the purpose back then and most importantly, I did not possess the knowledge I do now. Though I regret this, it wasn’t an intentional mistake.

As creators, we tend to get fixated on perfecting the software to oblivion and miss the goal of solving THE problem.

It has been an incredible journey, with so much new learning, so many sleepless nights, and many many hours of fighting over details, hundreds of WhatsApp messages, a couple of hacking attempts, 100s of soul-sucking hours debugging issues, and a tight tech budget.

Let's see what it has in store for the next couple of years to come!

These are the people that have helped me through this journey, kept me advised, and were with me on most decisions that I've made.

Mercy Hapsiba Vetrivel Palani Panneer Selvam Mohammed Ali Adv Poorvaja A. Ragupathy Ratheesh Krishnan / Rats Arun Prakash M

#tech #platform #erp #laravel #php #appdevelopment #webdevelopment #cto #problemsolving #ctoroutine