Why you should hire me

“The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Learning and being curious are the bread and butter for being good at anything. The technical skills one needs can be learned and forgotten quite easily, but a man’s attitude towards the problems he faces is what sets him apart from his fellow men. And a man’s attitude is formed through his habits and beliefs, and it’s a very hard thing to change ones’ core self!

Keeping that in mind, I’d like to go over a few of the character traits that I have developed thanks to the environment I was crafted in.

Passionate Learner

I was fortunate enough to have parents who stressed on the importance of self study, which implanted in me the love for discovery, exploration and problem solving, and the need and importance for deeper understanding. As a result, in my senior high school’s final exam I was one of the top scoring student amongst my fellow schoolmates most of whom had private tutors/coaching classes. The learning skils that I had acquired during my school times translated very well into my college as well as professional life where I’ve been assigned projects on technologies that I’ve never heard/used and it surprises my colleagues when I tell them that this was my first time working on xyz. :P

Story

Recently I was involved in a project where the client wanted to include a payment system into their website, our team decided to implement the system using stripe. I was a shadow resource in the project initially, and my job was to create a POC(proof of concept) for the proposed solution.
As I didn't have any experience with stripe, well actually I had never even heard of stripe, I decided to read through the docs, API specifications and study the stripe system(which btw is one of the best api docs I've read, kudos to the stripe team!).
After I got some understanding of how stripe works it was clear that the proposed system was not going to be a good long term solution(it was a plugin which was maintained by a third party) and had few other drawbacks, so I proposed a simpler system using Stripe Checkout where most of the heavy work(plus the checkout UI) would be handled by stripe itself.
At the end it came out wonderfully, the client was very pleased with how the payment flow worked and my PM was very surprised knowing that this was my first time working with stripe. :P

Obsessive Problem Solver

It’s not uncommon for my family to see me staring at the ceiling for long periods of time, which mostly signals that I’m working on a problem, destructuring it and finding clues, patterns to solve it. It’s one of my favorite activities! The kick that one gets from solving a problem is almost like a spiritual experience, especially if it was a challenging problem.

Loves Challenges

This shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve read the first two points.
I have a competitive programming background, I used to spend quite a lot of time doing CP during my college days, practicing hard problems and thinking about them when I’m doing something else(nightly walks, during lectures, talking a dump etc).
CP kind of shaped my personality in some sense, it gave me the confidence and the desire to seek and solve hard problems. Ofcourse the more defined and clear the problem is the more enjoyable it is to find a solution. It’s sort of like trekking but with a dishevelled map.