Today , I am very excited to post an interview session with one of the team members of the upcoming social network Pintrest, Mr Yashwanth. Here are some few questions we quoted and the pleasant answers from him.
Can you please give a small introduction about yourself to our readers ?
Hi I am Yashh and I work as an engineer at Pinterest. I am from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh.
Few details about your educational background.
I did my masters from San Jose State University and bachelors from V.R SiddharthaEngineering College. Right from my bachelors I was very interested in web application development. I spent a lot of time installing drupal / wordpress and try to make it do what I wanted. Although I was a computer science student my practical skills were way below par. Had to do a lot of hard work to reach a decent level. I still remember the dayswhere I used to not try enough and tried to get some help from IRC channels. I used to hassle some users to answer my questions and sometimes got kicked out of the room.
Can you tell us how you got into Pinterest ?
In Dec 2009 when Friendfeed was acquired by Facebook and open sourced Friendfeed’s tornado web serve,r I went to a talk from Friendfeed guys. That’s where I met founders of Pinterest. I was approached to work for them but I was happy at my job where I spent half of my day on github working on some open source projects. But some my friends encouraged me to join a startup since my working style would match a startup style. Thats how I took up pinterest.
Can you share your working experience with a rapid growing social networking site (Pinterest) ?
Before Pinterest I did not have much working experience apart from a couple of months ofwriting PHP and ruby for small companies. I was the only engineer for a while and I usedto crank lots of code. I love to architect stuff and I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to try out a lot of new stuff. Ben had immense trust on me and I would tryout new databases and push them to production in a day. I love working at Pinterest and love for being part of it. I love the feeling that the stuff I work is used my millionsof people everyday and my decisions impact a huge user experience.
We are expanding our team at a rapid pace and if you are
interested to be part of Pinterest you must write to jobs@pinterest.com.
What is your job role at Pinterest ?
I am a generalist engineer who wears lots of hats. I used to write some CSS as well but after some humor from my design crew I gave up on it. My day job mostly comprises of infrastructure decisions like how do we build this feature, what database should we use, how do we cache it make it fast. Apart from that I love operations and get to do a bitof work in that stream.
How do you feel about working in Pinterest as a person from INDIAN community?
I feel good. :)
Can you tell us what are the other more features that are going to be adopted in Pinterest in coming days ?Well I can’t disclose features but most of my work involves making Pinterest fast and reliable. And I can assure you that we are moving towards that goal every day. We are learning fast enough to keep up with our traffic.
