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…

Evolving Continuous Delivery in a Cloud-Native Environment

Community Update: Announcing Grofers Tech Talks!

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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…

Community Update — March 2019 (Gurgaon)

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

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…

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…

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…

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 —…

A Comprehensive Guide To Deploying A Website In Kubernetes

Recently, we at Grofers took a decision to migrate all our services to Kubernetes. Now during the process of migrating our frontend website to Kubernetes, we realised that the default Rolling Update deployment strategy doesn’t work that well and we had to shift to Blue Green strategy instead (we’ll go…

How We Improved Information Security at Grofers

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…

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 Continuous Github Code Hacking Keeps Grofers Secure

Security shouldn’t be treated as an after-thought Design by Asif Jamal When it comes to security, we always take it as the utmost priority. We strongly believe that “Security shouldn’t be treated as an after-thought”, it should be brought as close to engineers and as early in SDLC. Aside from the general guidelines put forth in the CIS benchmark for all…

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…

Data and the bid to simplify grocery

The most critical thing for any business to understand is what their user is looking for and address those needs efficiently. This can be done through collecting explicit user feedback as well as by analyzing their behavior on the platform through the rich engagement…

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…

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…

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…

Community Update — March 2019 (Bangalore)

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…

CPU Throttling in Kubernetes: A Postmortem

Kubernetes is a crucial part of our infrastructure. We don’t just deploy applications on Kubernetes in production, but we also use it heavily for our CI/CD and developer infrastructure. While developing our CI/CD infrastructure, we dealt with a particular performance issue of our dev and CI environments taking up a…

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 My Grofers Internship Came To Be

Design by Asif Jamal In May 2019, I started my internship at Grofers — India’s largest online grocery retailer. I was joining the infrastructure team that has some of India’s smartest and most capable engineers working on problems of scale. Me? It was my first time working in a real, professional environment. I was…

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. …