Ansible at Grofers (Part 1) — Introduction

About a year ago, we started setting up our infrastructure platform to make daily system operations and infrastructure maintenance easy and enable our developers in a way that they can move faster. This post is part one of a series on how we use Ansible at Grofers…

Supercharging Mobile Backend Development using ngrok & OpenResty

If you are developing mobile applications, it’s likely that you are getting data from a bunch of backend APIs. An API backend is a must if you want to develop for multiple platforms like Android, iOS, web etc While developing such API backend locally, sometimes you need…

It’s a million small things that matter

I joined Grofers in July 2018 from a young startup to throw myself into a previously unexplored territory of the Indian e-commerce and to experience product management at 10x the scale I have been working at. To my delight, the last four months have been no less than a roller…

React Native — The Sinner and the Saint

Design by Asif Jamal There’s been a lot of talk around React Native lately which discuss about its pros and cons and compare it with other cross-platform app frameworks like Flutter. Sadly, most of the blogs we see published today are centered around some or the other demo RN app being built from scratch. …

Reducing data transfer costs with a Docker registry cache

What Is Product Management?

Design by Asif Jamal After talking to leaders of different expertise from multiple startups and being in a product role myself for over four years, I discovered that there is still ambiguity around what a product manager brings to the table. Although, a good part of my understanding of the role has been shaped…

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…

Making Grocery Shopping Faster on Web

We released Grofers’ web platform about two months back. This post describes a few performance improvements that we have achieved in recent times. Background To bring about more user engagement and open the most straightforward user acquisition channel, we released our web platform to make it possible for…

How Grofers Doubled The VIP Pass Purchase Conversion For India’s Biggest Grocery Sale

The GOBD sale. The e-commerce sector in India continues to grow rapidly with major peaks around the holiday period. Sometimes a good ol’ sale will give you a baseline jump faster than any new product initiative on a fixed scale of time. Making the sale big therefore is of paramount importance. At Grofers…

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…

Designers, Good Designers, And Great Designers

To design is to solve a problem. And we solve problems all day long! Does that make everyone a designer? Got into a fight with your partner? Here are some possible solutions: Shout and scream until you explode Bring them flowers Whip yourself a hundred times in an act of self-flagellation Write a card Buy them a present Stop talking and hope they forget about it (my favourite), etc. Finally…

Community Update: Announcing Grofers Tech Talks!

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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…

Show and Tell S02E01

How I Work: Devika Razdan

At Grofers, we have some of the smartest people who collaborate to do great work. Over the years, these individuals have crafted their own systems and tools for productivity and in this series, we share how they excel using the systems, methods, and tools that work for them. Over the…

The birth— Initial Project Setup

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash This is the second blog of the full Grofers RN blog series. Through this series Grofers attempts to share its journey in integrating React Native into…

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…

Anomaly detection using Isolation forest

How We Improved Information Security at Grofers

How I Started Working With Kubernetes

Animation by Asif Jamal I first heard about Kubernetes in 2016. When Docker was the new boom, Kubernetes was introduced as a prototype system to manage containers. Though I was unsure of getting into it, I passed it at that time as I was content with containers and didn’t need any orchestration. However, when…

Is your MVP slowing you down?

Over time, the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has started meaning different things to different people. Before I proceed to put my point across, it will be helpful to…

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…

How We Sustain DNS Outages at Grofers

Design by Asif Jamal Cloudflare is one of the most popular DNS and CDN service provider currently used by over 16 million internet sites. Every day, these sites utilize Cloudflare’s services for performance enhancement, DDoS mitigation, and more. We do too. So when Cloudflare suffered multiple outages, it affected websites around the globe. And…

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…

Progressive Web Apps, UX and Engagement

In the past few years, Web Applications and Smartphone based Mobile Applications have played a…