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…

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…

Reducing AWS data transfer cost: Kubernetes from Multi-AZ to Single-AZ

The only silver lining for us during COVID-19 was that we got a chance to optimize our resources in our run to cut costs — a long-pending activity. All the teams across the organization were focused on reducing the operating costs as much as possible. Similarly, DevOps teams were mainly…

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…

Community Update — March 2019 (Bangalore)

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…

React Native at Grofers: Using React Native components inside native views

Horizontal scrolling widget has been built in…

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…

5 not-so-basic basic guidelines to become a mediocre UX/UI/Product designer.

1. Don’t fall in love with your solutions. Fall in love with the problem. Reference to pop culture. Check. Nothing is written in stone. Especially your…

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…

Reducing data transfer costs with a Docker registry cache

Anomaly detection using Isolation forest

Ansible at Grofers (Part 2) — Managing PostgreSQL

We have diverse data needs at Grofers. And we use different kinds of databases to fulfill different needs. We started with Postgres in the beginning as our primary data store. And even though we have become polyglot with databases, Postgres remains to be the most used database…

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…

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…

Origins of Data Lake at Grofers

Design by Asif Jamal The Beginning As Data Engineers at the biggest online grocery company in India, one of our major challenges is to democratize data across the organization. But, when we began evaluating how well we were doing on this goal, we realized that frequent errors in our data pipelines had caused our business teams…

Launch quickly, inspect closely, iterate rapidly

Postmortem: Outage due to Elasticsearch’s flexibility and our carelessness

On November 25 at 4:30 AM, our consumer apps stopped working because of some issue with our backend API. This article is a postmortem of what happened that night. Some Background Our product search and navigation is served from Elasticsearch. We create daily index of products, related merchant data…

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…

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…

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…

Grofers Lambda: A 2019 Year-In-Review

The most-read authors, stories, and what’s coming in 2020. In 2019, we increased our focus on Lambda with an aim to share stories that give you an insider look into the tech and people that run Grofers. As a result, 2019 turned out to be an incredible year of learning for all of us at Grofers engineering. Best? our…

Hoomans, emotions, products and other crises.

Wait, back up! Let’s take…

How I Work: The art of balancing

Tatramajjhattatā is the Buddhist word for neutrality of mind. It speaks about a balance that helps an individual keep their mind calm and healthy. This is crucial not only for individuals but also for eco-systems. Organisations are not any different and it is a microcosm of this complex infinite universe…

Get Your Product The Attention It Deserves

Design by Asif Jamal It’s Christmas time. You’re walking down that crowded market street. After having saved money for a long time, you’re now hunting for presents for your loved ones. You have narrowed down your idea of a gift and have decided to get them the best sweaters in town. Your friend tells you of a…