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Shopify Life Story Round 2

/**
 * The Life Story interview is an opportunity for you to talk about how you've come to be where you are today, and your passions and interests. Feel free to come armed with any questions about joining Shopify - We'll be happy to fill you in. This interview will be held over Google Meet with a Recruiter - you'll find the "Google Meet" link in this calendar invitation.

https://portal.shopify.com/password
Password - impact

Shopify life story interview
- We seek people with a growth mindset (in contrast with a fixed mindset).
- Life story is where we want to know more about people while we look for pivotal moments of personal or professional growth in their lives.
- You could talk about times where a challenge or obstacle came in your way, and you made the necessary adjustments to make the most out of that situation or escape from a blocker.
- Be authentic, talk about what your passions are and what you care about. If you want to keep your personal life private, it's also okay, just talk about your professional life and what really motivated you to become the professional you are today.

[Suggestions]
- Life Story Round - This is more like a behavior round where they ask you to tell the story of yourself mentioning how and why you came to engineering.
- They try to test your communication skills and dig into your motivation for being an engineer.
- The round takes like 1 hr.

Tips to prepare for the interview
1. No need to stress yourself for complex data structures and algorithms
2. You are allowed to use the internet and check any documentation as no one can remember the syntax completely.
3. Make sure you focus a lot of TDD. I think every interviewer expects that you share some set of extensive test cases/path before writing the code.
4. Don't forget to tell them in detail why are you making each class and method. I tried to explain while coding but in the feedback, I was not vocal enough.
*/

// QUESTIONS
/*

Q. My previous roles and responsibilities 

Q. Why Shopify ? 

Q. Explain my recent project and the tech stack.

Q. How did you get into Software Engineering? What did you study at university/school? What prompted you to pursue this? [Duplicate]

Q. Why did you change job? Why did you choose this project? why why why? [Duplicate]

Q. Explain to me in details about one of your recent project [Duplicate]

Q. Looking back how would you do things differently in X project?

Q. Tell me how you came to engineering? [Duplicate]

Q. Why Shopify? [Duplicate]

Q. Past project details. [Duplicate]

Q. Tell you life story.. tell us how you ended up where you are now. [Duplicate]

Q. What is growth to you?

Q. Tell me about a technical/coding project you are proud of

Q. What do you enjoy in coding?

Q. What's the most interesting project you've undertaken and what's interesting about it? [Duplicate]

Q. How did you get into web development? [Duplicate]

Q. Show a previous example of work that I was proud of. [Duplicate]

Q. How did you get into technology? [Duplicate]

Q. Describe a situation where you were challenged and how did you overcome it [Duplicate]


*/

// ANSWERS for -- Q My previous roles and responsibilities 
/*
Q. My previous roles and responsibilities 
A. 
- I started my career in engineering 2014
- Before that worked in call-centers, had graduation degree, no-idea about life
- Working in BPO for night shifts, I was introduced to excel macros by the manager.
- Then started learning c programming, Curious to know how comments on fb are stored leanet html, database from youtube
- Built a tracker to capture the duration of the process. It was an internal tool we used to analyse the performance.
- It was a form in excel.
- Wanted to learn more about the programming and wanted to change my career. I knew career switch wont be easy. 
- So, Went to college again to do Masters in programming.

- **XEROX** | Trainee (May,2014-Aug,2014) (6 Months)
- Started my first job in 2014, as a trainee
- I was working on creating test plans and the more focus was on testing. I wanted to learn more about the startups

- **LetsGoMo Labs​** | Software Engineer (Aug,2014-May,2015) (9 Months)
- Finally got a software engineer profile
- Language: PHP, Javascript, JQuery, CSS, Magento[Framework]
- It got aquired by SnapDeal

- **Snapdeal​** | Software Engineer I (Jun ‘15 - Apr’16) (11 Months)
- Worked as a part of growth team. 
- I was included in SnapLite - Lighter version of the mobile site. 
- Created JS utils library from scratch
- 4 Parts - Home, Product Listing Page (PLP), Filters, Product Details (PDP)
- Released in 12 languages, got media attention.
- It was about rendering the page fast.
    - LazyLoading (different pages had it's own js bundle)
    - Loading image on demand
    - Minification using grunt
    - Rendering image with hight and width
    - Using sprites for small icons
    - Optimized iamges for different view, like list view had small resolution and detail view had large
- Was working only on one part of the project. 
- Wanted to know about server side + backend side. Left the job

- **Voodoo​** | Fullstack Engineer (Apr ‘16 - Oct’16) (6 Months)
- Bunch of engineers from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)
- Being a person from Tier3 college it was a very good opportunity
- Also I was not scoped into the boundaries of the profile.
- I was introduced to Alfred, IntelliJ, iTerm
- Language - NodeJs, AngularJS
- Worked on setting up Digital Ocean with Nginx for load balancing.
- It was super exciting, built alot of crawlers.
- It was a product company, the product was very innovative.
- Rendering voodo app on other ecommerece app and get product details. Then show comparisons.
- It got closed down because of cash crunch

- ** HealthTap​ ** Software Developer (Oct‘16 - Sept’17) (11 Months)
- This was my first Remote job
- HealthTap is in US and they wanted to hire people in India, I was their third developer who was working from India
- Because of my javascript experience. I was given projects related to their main site which was built on rails and native js
- Extending classess using prototype & they had their own design system. 
- At that time react was getting attraction and HealthTap started to plan on creating the client facing app using that. 
- Multi-tenant architecture, build a single app which was used by clients. I worked on one part of that platform. Which was scheduling appointments.
- Because they had whole team in US, after a while they started to share only small features with me since I was the only FE dev in india.
- But I wanted to learn more and grow my skills. So, I looked out and found an opportunity to fly out of the country for the first time in my life.

- **Creadits**​ | Frontend Developer | Singapore (Sept‘17 - Nov’19) (2.5years)
- This was my first time out working abroad.
- They hired me to build a platform for designers from scartch 
- React/Redux and Webpack 
- The company got award from FB as well for the Idea of the year.
- Idea was to build a platform which could act as a middle man between Advertisers and Designers
- It was good and but then after Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, company had lost it's advertiser account permissions
- Then they had to change the business model and worked on selling bundle of services to the advertisers
- Engineering team had no vision. We were just building internal tools to capture the analytics and some requests. 
- So I started to look out for new opportunities. 

- **MoneySmart​** | Senior Frontend Developer | Singapore (Nov'19 - Present) (1.3years)
- I was hired as Senior Frontend Developer
- Worked with the commercial team, increased 20% signups by email capture campaign development, and redesigned user flow for all the campaigns.
- Working on migrating 2 user-facing legacy platforms from scratch.
- Responsible for general availability of production environment for above mentioned projects.
- Replaced legacy Singapore Customer Support Application with an efficient knowledge-based ​Contact-Us Nuxt Application.
- Developed​ Self-serve Claims Tracker​ - leading to 10% reduced customer queries.
- Successfully hacked several proof-of-concept, including converting potential leads, seamlessly integrating with streams like WhatsApp.
- Currenlty building an Admin tool from scratch 
- Using VueJS/Tailwind/ElementUI 
- I'm disappoint about the size of role. I'm boxed in FE side and don't get opportunities out of that box.
- I'm not involved in the big decisions that are being made. It didn’t feel like I could make the impact I’d dreamed of.
- I think people here don't recognize my potential
*/

//  Q. ANSWER for -- Q Why Shopify ? 
/*
 // https://www.shopify.com/careers/culture/ux
 - People at Shopify work hard together, and encourage each other to grow as professionals.
 - I want to solve hard problems. At Shopify, it require more effort than some people are prepared to give.
 - I know I’m still learning every day.  To be successful here, you need to have a constant curiosity. And I'm always curious.
 - I'm a continual learner and know there is alot more to find out.
 -- I like worke out of my comfort zone and I guess Shopify could provide that environment.
 -- I'm curious about working on new things
 -- I know I’m still learning every day.
 -- I want to work on hard problesm. 
 -- Want to work in enviornment where people encourage each other to grow as professionals.
 // 
 
 // https://www.shopify.com/careers/culture/datascience
  What I learnt after coming to Singapore
 - I was not confident because I didn't know everything. 
 - I understood that knowlege gives me confidence but I also reasized that even if I don't know I can figure it out so no need to be ashamed when you don't know something. 
 - That's the fact, do you research to get more information.
 - I have so many ideas in my notepad
 - I have so many questions, and I keep learning to solve those problems.
 - I was told to build typeform in Creadits, It made me a better programmer.
 - I don't just right away work I try to invlove my self in the project planning to understand where it is coming from.
 - I go on strolls to clear my head and build my note list of ideas.
 - I'm implemented 10s of ideas on weekends
 - To build system at scale, I learnt docker, kubernetes, React with hooks, Hasura (GraphQL) Postgres, Svelte, Digital ocean/Nginix
 - I use sticky note wisely, I have tons of them at my home-workstation
 - I wake up early to sharpen my skills everyday.
 - I've a roadmap for my career in front of my eyes every second.
 - I take full ownership of the work I do and like to be held accountable for that. 
 - My risk appetite is high
 - Listen to startup podcasts
 - Read self help books
 - Read out lout to practice conversations.

 I've read about the culture of Shopify on the careers page and beleive this can help me grow as an indiviual and visa versa I'm happy to be a part of team and use my skill to grow it.
*/

// I want to know about the problems people have solved

// ANSWER for -- Q. Explain my recent project and the tech stack.
/*
 - Currently working on building a campaign system
 - Context - MoneySmart is plaform which allows users to make better financial decision
 - We have products like - Credit-cards, Home Loan, Personal Loan, Car Insurance and Online Brokerage
 - So For credit-cards we have tie up with various banks which give variety of insentives over the signup/purchase
 - Last year we did an MVP which allowed us to capture the information of the user from this purchase flow.
 - As per the previous trend these incentives are lucrative and they get alot of attraction
 - So the task was to build an admin platform which allows marketing team to run these campaigns
 - And customer service teams to have data related to these campaigns
 - It bridges the gap and allows everyone to have a single view of the customer purchase.
 - I'm the only FE dev in the team so I did a research and give a few options.
 - But we went on with the tech which is more know to all the devs - Rails & Vue
 - Vue element admin is the template I used & I introduced tailwind in that. 
 - We are launching soon.
*/

// ANSWER for -- Q. Looking back how would you do things differently in X project?
/*
 - I remember working on a project where I was asked to build typeform like project
 - The idea was to get all the information from user in STEP-BY-STEP for so that they don't feel stressed while filling the giant form
 - I was using Angular 1.x on the FE side and BE dev was using php
 - What happend - I was used to working with product managers who had clear requirements
 - I thought that's the same case here also. But what started to happen was the requirements started to change every day.
 - Now being a first timer out of the country I was getting stressed out and it was very overwhelming for me to coverup new things
 - Deadlines kept on increasing and the reason PM told me that we need to build the better product so this is how it will go.
 - It took us 2 months to build that form because of so many new changes and I'm not very proud of the work I did to accomplish that.
 - After that I failure of my life. I changed the way I work and I try to finallize things and planning before writing the actual code.
 - Building MVP is not a problem but building a solution requires deep understanding of product as we as the processes.
 - So It has made me a better person. I've been consistent in delivering things since then as I know how to handle this kind of situation.
 - So to do it properly 
  - There should be a proper objective in the mind
  - Time is expensive so it should be given to the things which are at priority 0
  - Rather that just rushing in to things and solving the symptom we should look into the root cause.
*/

// ANSWER for -- Q. What is growth to you?
/*
 - Growth is when my technical skills growth hand in hand with my personal
 - I want to work with professionals who have growth mindset.
 - That means continuesly learning new stuff and ready to dive into hard problems
 - I'm always curious about new things and read/build stuff which interests me.
 - Working out of comfirt zone is where growth is.
*/

// ANSWER for -- Q. Tell me about a technical/coding project you are proud of
/*
 - Most of the time in the startups - India/Singapore
 - I've worked on the probles which were already soved.
 - People at product companies are building every product from scratch as per their business requirements
 - So I've worked on things like
 - Building a typeform like form
 - Building a Listview which is fast in loading
 - Found out ways to build a list-view like pinterest.
 - However, the project which I'm most proud of is the one I built for my self. Typeform like form
*/

// ANSER for -- Q. What do you enjoy in coding?
/*
 - Coding is very intersting
 - It allows me to solve real life problems - 
 - It's like I'm bringing something to life -- Just like what they say it's your babay
 - I like the fact that I can automate some tasks using the set of instructions
 - Very Very Coolllll
*/

// https://dariusforoux.medium.com/how-people-will-listen-to-what-you-have-to-say-8b1705cca218