This month’s #ClouderaLife Spotlight features software engineer Amogh Desai. Here we discuss his background, how he got started at Cloudera, and his recent win at the Cloudera 2022 Global Hackathon.
Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat
Amogh and his fellow hackathon team members felt the rush of victory after winning Cloudera’s 2022 global hackathon in the product development category. The team was on the road to redemption after coming just short of winning the last regional hackathon.
The global hackathon was composed of teams across the business to compete on the best new product ideas. Each team had 48 hours straight to develop their idea for demonstration to the contest judges.
“It was a great feeling to go home with the winning idea,” Amogh said.
Amogh and his team’s winning idea was a “Smart Instance Selector” which automates the identification of the most appropriate machine instances when deploying a product. This would solve the problem of relying on a customer who would have to select the instance. Selecting the instance by the customer is an imprecise method since there are many variables in getting it right, like machine type, size, and number of machines. It also happens that the cloud providers update their instance types and deprecate them all the time leading to installation failures, making the customers feel that the software is faulty when truly it is the hardware.
Meet Amogh Desai
Amogh lives in Bangalore and joined Cloudera, first as an intern and then full-time in July of 2021 as a software engineer. His day-to-day consists of development activities like writing and reviewing code, working on features around release timelines, and participating in design meetings for the team supporting the CDP Data Engineering product.
CDP Data Engineering helps offload orchestration and automation processes from in-house data engineers and data practitioners to free them up to get to work on their day-to-day responsibilities.
Amogh has the unique experience of working on CDP Data Engineering during his internship. At the time the product was still in its infancy. Then, when he joined Cloudera full time he continued to work on the product and saw it brought to market. “I got a lot of satisfaction out of working on it from the beginning and now to see customers using it,” said Amogh.
Prior to Cloudera, Amogh attended the Peoples Education Society (PES) University in Bangalore. PES University is the country’s leading teaching and research university. There Amogh majored in computer science and engineering with a specialization in data science. From there he was recruited into the Cloudera internship program.
Amogh is a second-generation engineer, his father, an automotive engineer, moved to various cities with his family as new opportunities arose. Amogh’s younger brother is also a budding engineer who just started his studies.
Working at Cloudera and the road ahead
Amogh has really enjoyed working at Cloudera. “My work at Cloudera keeps me challenged. It’s like I have a new puzzle to solve every day. I like that as I feel I’m continually growing,” he said. “I also have a brilliant team that I can depend on, and we have a lot of fun. Also, I have been impressed with how encouraging management has been. They always give recognition to those who have worked hard.”
In reflecting on his career up to this point, Amogh’s advice to someone new to software development is to not be afraid to fail. “Often, we want to do everything perfectly or not show the team or boss that we made mistakes. But this holds one back because we really grow from making mistakes. Not to mention software is always evolving so you can’t possibly know everything. Ask questions and explore and people will help you.”
In visualizing where he’d like to take his career in the next five years, Amogh said, “I’d like to continue in the development track and grow my skills. I want to learn more and start moving into product architecture in the next two years while gaining experience in open-source software and then lead a team of junior developers.”
Speaking of learning more, Amogh is always trying to learn more about technology whether that be reading about it or discussing it with others. One way he does this is through blog writing. Check out his Blog on Medium where he discusses productivity and creative thinking around software development.
Thanks, Amogh, for your contributions to Cloudera and for sharing your story.
