Concept – Technology – Application – The 3 Pillars of Technical Study

Over the course of our experience teaching thousands of engineering students and professionals and our interactions with several stake-holders, we have heard several concerns from students, faculty members and businesses alike. There are some key patterns in the concerns raised and one of them is about what Engineering students should learn in their curriculum. In this post we make a humble attempt to answer this question with a seemingly simple but effective approach that students can take for guaranteed success.

Table of Contents

  1. Problems faced by various stake-holders
  2. Our reponsibility as Engineers
  3. The Missing Gap in Technical Skillset
  4. Conceptual Depth
  5. Technologies – the missing piece in the puzzle
  6. Being successful as an Engineer
  7. The Golden Mantra
  8. A Technology Ninja?
  9. Teaching to build and learn

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Scaling processes for a growing startup

Jnaapti completed 6 years this May. What started as a 1 person company in 2011, is now a growing business with more than a dozen people working on different aspects of the business. We have conducted training in over 35 organizations in over 30 technologies in the last 6 years.

Like many other tech startups, I started off writing the entire code for our main product, The Virtual Coach, single handedly. The first version of the product took me 2.5 months to build from concept to deployment.

We are now a team of 8-10 engineers working on different aspects of engineering. We now have multiple products in the education space and are targeting multiple customer segments.

When it was just one or two people, we didn’t need a formal project management process. It doesn’t mean a process didn’t exist; rather, the process was in the heads of the individuals who were part of the development team.

If 2 of us are programming, we can easily share tasks, arrive on deadlines and decide our commitments without requiring any elaborate processes as long as we trust each others’ commitments. We may resort to using simple tools like Spreadsheets or may even use pen and paper or a whiteboard.

However, as the organization grows, the number of cross-communication in the team increases. If every person communicates with every other, there is chaos and this soon starts reflecting in the overall efficiency of the organization. This is not a new problem and has been elaborately discussed in some excellent literature.

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The Jnaapti Journey – Meetup Stories

It was 2014, and Shreelakshmi had just moved to Bangalore. She had just assumed her new role as “Head of Training & Operations” at jnaapti in February 2014. One of her goals was to bring more visibility to jnaapti. This is an account of her experience of growing a community with technical meetup sessions.

Shreelakshmi’s memories go back to the days when jnaapti was still a single person organization and was hardly known in the community. jnaapti grew to be a four member team in early 2014. It was during this phase that jnaapti was taking baby steps towards a bigger future that we are living in today.

We brainstormed on how to make people around us know jnaapti and the work we do. We started looking for various ways to conduct events which will help spread our learning philosophies. That is when we came across the site Meetup.com.

The First Meetup

They say the first step is always the hardest and so it was with our meetup journey as well.

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