The other face of flipkart

When one thinks of Flipkart one imagines a sales company. Nothing could be farther from the essence of the company. A search on github reveals that flipkart has had several accounts over time. From incubation to production accounts.

The one I believe to be the official channel has several repos of interest. A linux fork used by flipkart. Several database adapters and parsers. APIs in multiple languages.

They have stuck to the heavyweights like C,C++ and Java. Some occasional repositories do have scala,pascal and python too. This surprised me. I had assumed flipkart to be a completely e-commerce website and this was not foreseen by me. The handle has 21 people as of writing this article. However I could not find the Bansals within them. They might have a username different from their actual name. This discovery got me digging.

The repositories are not starred a lot but are from repositories which are forked plenty. The code I went through was well written with the future in mind. What I can conclude is that there are a lot of programmers in flipkart who are better than me. Some of the algorithm implementations amaze me with their cleanliness and efficiency.

Surprisingly a lot of the code is open source. This is a company which has harnessed the power of open source. with a thousand developers they can be sure that their code will be robust.

With the mindset that flipkart is a tech based company, I began digging aroud in the flipkart.com homepage source code. The javascript console offered something interesting.

It was a recruitment advertisement. Knowing that the Bansals worked at amazon before flipkart, i went ahead and looked into amazon's source code. Nothing there. Then the flipkart recruitment is an original thing.

This puts me back to the million sale. From a tech background the sale was a nightmare. With everyone in India clambering to buy stuff, keeping proper stock accounts and proper chronological records of transactions must have been a horrible thing.

With the discovery of flipkart as a tech company, I finally have hope. If I can be a good enough programmer, I might end up with an empire as big as flipkart.

The unseasonal rain

The tears of a titan in eden,
Unseasonal like a fickle storm.
When all are wrapped in putrescence,
Comes the unblessed pelting.

Those drowned in fear lift their head,
those near end have hope again,
the titan cries healing tears
when none expect.

This rain so clear washes away,
the dreary dreaded despair,
Those clouds rumbling in the sky,
fill me with will again.

I thank the blessed titan,
giving me fuel in a drought,
Hope my efforts will bear fruit.
That some day like this unseasonal rain,
I will do something good.

A fall

The season of fall is hither,
Leaves parted from eternal matrimony,
A trivial affair
the wind sweeps them away and the night ends in tragedy.

Their true love excised,
colour leaves their being fading from
lively green to a dead yellow.

In their mourning they move in droves,
gathering on the sad old earth to create
dunes of death.

The animals frolic in their demise and turn rue to glee,
Each stomp entombing the widower in the earth,
witnessed by the peerless wind so treacherous.

Come morn the men sweep away
the deluge of mirthless remains.
Relics of a love lost ,amour turned sour.
This is the season of fall.