The Intern
Recently I had been an Intern at Frappe. To get more context, Frappe is the company behind ERPNext. ERPNext is an Open Source ERP built on top of the Frappe homegrown Python Framework called Frappe Framework and I don’t think many Indian companies have a framework of their own. Frappe is so cool, the people, the philosophy and the values. The People were so kind and helpful and the best of all a great learning experience.
When I was a kid my parents and elders used to tell me a Malayalam proverb “കുന്നോളം ആശിച്ചാലേ കുന്നികുരുവോളം കിട്ടു” which translates to “Dream Big to acheive the smallest”. There maybe better translations but nothing comes to mind now. Looking into this, this proverb was for the lazy dreamers who wanted great things in life but never work for it, the one thing I got to learn is if you’ve put the effort for acheiving it then you shall receive. Sadly I didn’t understand the logic behind dreaming big, what’s the point? Like Buddha says, “Desire is the root cause for all suffering”.
The point I’m trying to say is I didn’t dream to be part of a Google or Microsoft. Budding Developers seems to think that you need to get into a FAANG company for your life to settle but that isn’t anyways true. The one thing developers seems to do is work like robots and make shit tons of money, but here too what’s the point of making shit tons of money? To be respected? Money can’t buy anyone happiness, it’s one of the ways to surf capitalism’s wave. Being a Catholic, I was fascinated by the Bible in my earlier years, one of the sentences/quotes(English isn’t my first language and my vocabulary has become too redundant and my brain functions feels deteriorated while I try to translate words) which actually shows the hollowness of money/power
“What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Matthew 16:26
After all this ranting on my life philosophies(I may regret this later 🙈).
I can’t tell you on what I’ve worked there, but these are some rants on what I learned
Books
Most of the people at Frappe are ardent readers. This came like a surprise to me, never have I in my 3 years of studying in college and having a dozen cousins and their spouses in Engineering heard about a full team so spirited on reading books and having a book club and bi-weekly calls to talk about books. This time at Frappe made me read quite a handful of books and an urge to spend money on books. Books were also a topic of discussion in company wide calls.
Philosphy/Ideals
I never understood the philosophy behind writing code untill now. Honestly, there isn’t much to blabber about on code philosophy but it can be either perfect code or sphagetti code which has to be refactored over and over to attain a certain “perfectionism”. Frappe has certain values/ideals and from what I understood, each person working there follows that unbeknownst to the individual. It’s something that the senior engineers always impact the junior engineers and their peers. You can read more about the values at Frappe here
Code styles
Underscores, underscores and underscores…. Only use underscores. Period. Or write every method in Python or JavaScript in snake case. No camelCase, never use it. The other code styles usually come to typing, spaces after equals and variable naming.
Frappe Framework
This is a tech sided stuff but hell yeah, this was one of the best things I’ve learned in 2021. T’was a bit bulky to learn at start but later it was quite easier to build something on top of it. Initially it was a bit hard to understand how it works, but later on it was easier than most frameworks I’ve learned. Everything was a lot easier with it.
People were so good there. We had games on Discord every Friday and everyone gave their honest feedback at all times. People appreciate you to for a smallest achievement you made, and the flexible timing made the environment stress free. But on a personal note, it was a tough time for me from a mental aspect. I was feeling a lot dejected and lonely and the people there helped me a lot. They gave me new perspectives of music, new perspective of movies and series and yes of course books. Frappe gave me good friends and that’s something I’m really grateful for 💖.
P.S: This was written after months of procrastinating from blogging. People won’t read it much but I guess I have lost the flair on writing too.