Community Development @ Grofers

Photo taken at a meetup we hosted. This upcoming Saturday(October 27th), we will be hosting meetups themed around Android, Python, and Kubernetes. This will be a great day to come by the office and chat with the people that built Grofers. Be sure to bring your laptop(someplace to put all the stickers.)

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…

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!

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Do You Need A Personal OKR?

Design by Asif Jamal Making a contract with your future self When we started using OKRs in Grofers, it was to ensure that we had a way of getting everyone on the same page around what was important towards our goals as a team and as a company. This exercise taught us a lot and although we’ve failed in every…

Anomaly detection using Isolation forest

Ansible at Grofers (Part 4) — Manageable auto-scaling with Ansible

Auto-Scaling Groups (ASG) in AWS EC2 provide a really easy way to scale your services horizontally based on different kinds of alarms. It launches instances using existing AMIs baked by you for your services. While ASGs are easy to understand at a high level, they have their own challenges —…

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…

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

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…

A Day in Release Engineering at Grofers

This post touches up facets of what release engineering is at Grofers and what the life of an engineer on this team looks like. After reading this, one should get an idea about why it is important to us, what is an engineer supposed to do to support the team…

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…

Community Update — March 2019 (Gurgaon)

For the Golang track, community member Ishaan Bahal talked about GRPC and its use cases from the ground up…

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…

Building a technology first company

Over the past few years, we have seen rise of tech companies. There are a lot of definitions of what truly is a technology company. There are also different terminologies like “tech driven”, “tech enabled” and “pure tech”. And the debate goes on… At Grofers, our vision is to be…

Show and Tell S02E01

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…

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…

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…