In Focus: Sancheeta Kaushal

Sancheeta is an engineering manager with the innovation team at grofers. She is an old timer who joined us way back in June 2015. Her work at grofers goes beyond her current team and you can find her organising events and forming communities in her free time. Here are some…

Transform your Automation Suite Into a Testing Product — Part 1

When we talk about the test product that is owned and managed by the testing team, what comes to your mind immediately. Is it a test suite, test management tool, or any defect tracking tool? I guess the most obvious one that comes to your mind is the test suite…

Anomaly detection using Isolation forest

Building Personalisation at Scale

I have talked about how we have been building a technology first company in my previous post. Taking this further, I am back with the next level of innovation we have been doing to make our customer journey as satisfying as its for us to serve them! At Grofers, our…

How to use your private NPM packages with Docker on CI

Our team recently came across a strange issue where one of our application was failing to build after we installed another internal library as a dependency to this app. This was very strange as we were able to get it working on our local machines and the only thing separating…

Why physical storage of your database tables might matter

In our quest to simplify and enrich online grocery shopping for our users, we experimented with serving personalized item recommendations to each one of them. For this we operated in batch mode and pre computed relevant top 200 item recommendations for each user and dumped the results in a table…

The Final Call — The good and the bad of React Native

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash This blog is part of the Grofers React Native blog series. Through this series we attempt to share the journey of integrating React…

What we have been shipping at Grofers

In March, COVID-19 changed a lot of things for the world. Grofers has been no exception. Unlike many business and economic scenarios that can be estimated or predicted for, COVID-19 stands as a tough exception. What this means for us is that our larger focus for March has been on…

Show and Tell S02E01

On Setting Up Our AWS VPC

TL;DR: This blog post is about the choices we made while trying to organize our infrastructure resources in AWS VPC and automating everything around it. Our Infrastructure So Far Since we signed up on AWS fairly recently, we were given a VPC by default. We used to launch EC2 instances seamlessly…

Grofers Virtual Hackday 2020

Everyone at Grofers Tech loves Hackathons because this is one day when we forget all the worries of the world and jump right into solving problems. Be it an old idea solved using a new tech or a new idea solved with just an excel prototype, this is a day…

Monitoring Java Web Apps using Prometheus and Grafana

Recently, I have been exploring ways to make systems as monitorable as possible, which means minimizing the number of unknown-unknowns!

Open-sourcing codon: workflow framework for building aggregator APIs

As a startup, we need to experiment with our product a lot — constantly changing our UI and our backend processes to support new experimental features…

Application Server Optimization

For the past few weeks, I have been working on improving our system. The improvements involve metrics related to latency. In this article, I am sharing some recipes that I found helpful in my work. This article will be Python-Django specific. I think it should be generally…

Personal Staging Environment for Micro-Services Architecture

Grofers has been following micro-services architecture for a while now. While there are plenty of advantages…

Learnings From Two Years of Kubernetes in Production

Almost two years back, we took the decision to leave behind our Ansible based configuration management setup for deploying applications on EC2 and move towards containerisation and orchestration of applications using Kubernetes. We have migrated most of our infrastructure to Kubernetes. It was a big undertaking and had its own…

Adopting Tekton — Cloud Native CI Solution

We have been exploring Tekton as a CI platform recently for office and off-office work. So I thought to share all my findings with you. Tekton is a powerful yet flexible, Kubernetes-native open-source framework for creating continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems. But before we proceed, let’s see what…

Software Engineering Internship at Grofers

Internships are a training ground for the professional “real world”. What exactly does the “real world” entail? How disjoint is it from what we learn at university? Am I equipped enough to step into this simulation of the…

How To Decide The Success Metrics For Your Product

Design by Asif Jamal I have repeatedly made this mistake of looking at the wrong metrics for the new products that we released. The realization of these mistakes made me seek mentoring from some of the accomplished product folks. I wish I had reached out for their mentoring even earlier to grow faster. Young…

How We Improved Information Security at Grofers

The Power of a Tech Community

Let’s talk tech — Organised by Women who code in collaboration with Grofers. “Community is much more than belonging to something; it is about doing something together that makes belonging matter” — Brian Solis When I was in college, I had a clear agenda in place. I had decided to spend less time figuring out the next class I had to attend…

Iris — Merchant Discovery at Grofers

A, C, and E are the visible merchants Each merchant in our system has the following characteristics: Merchant location Merchant serviceability distance (i.e. places where the merchant delivers) As soon as the user opens the consumer app, the user location gets fired. We consider a list of…

Hoomans, emotions, products and other crises.

Wait, back up! Let’s take…

How COVID-19 pushed us to reduce our AWS cost by half

We have been extremely focused on growth before COVID started. AWS is central to how we ship fast that helps fuel that growth. Some of our early mistakes resulted in wastage resulting in high costs over time. COVID-19 pushed us to bring more efficiency in our business operations to provide…

A crazy, wild, roller-coaster ride

It was towards the end of October 2014 that I came to know about Grofers. A friend of mine had…