Suchandrim Sarkar is a self taught Android Developer from Durgapur, West Bengal.

Technology had always been his source of joy and that’s how his passion for Android developed.

He is a perfect example of someone who followed his passion and became good at it. By the time you finish reading his story you will understand how much he enjoys his career.

I am taking this opportunity to thank Ms.Mousumi Bhattacharya, Suchandrim’s college teacher for giving him that inspiration, which I believe made a lot of difference. I hope she gets to read this story one day.

What you do and how you do it?

In one line, I develop Android apps for clients.

My typical day at office starts around 10 AM with the daily brief meetings. Sometimes we have longer meetings twice in a month to decide about the features and how to approach them. Rest of the day is to work on features and bugs for the project I am working on. There can be other meetings in between depending on the day. The work load is very comfortable and almost everyday I can leave office by 5-6 PM.

There is a Part 2 to this post where he explains how you can become an Android Developer?

What do you love about your job?

• Great work life balance.
• The workload is manageable and comfortable.
• Though I am a fresher, my views are given as much importance as those of the seniors. Designation has very less impact when it comes to work and showing your skills.
• My colleagues are helpful, friendly and fun. And they are really experienced developers to learn from.
• We work in small teams with most recent technologies. For example, Kotlin, a new language based on JVM is the new big thing in Android to replace Java, and we are already using it in our projects.
• Learned lot more that I ever imagined. Finally got certified by Google as an Android Developer.
• I leave office around 6 PM and have ample time to work on my personal stuff.

What steps did you take to land in your present job?

Creating a great portfolio of your personal works helps to showcase your talent and skills.

Therefore, I created a great app, Crimson Music Player which was able to compete with any other similar app in the play store. It is pretty complicated and as of May 2017 it has around 1,30,000 lines of code. This revealed my skills and deep knowledge about the Android platform, as well as got me multiple job offers. Other than creating apps, I did internships, freelancing and taking workshops which helped as well, but none had the impact of my Music Player.

What have been the most surprising elements of this career?

Android is continuously changing and we have to keep ourselves updating. Lagging behind is not an option.

Everyday there is a new Library which does something crucial, better and we rush to learn that. Every Google I/O brings in a lot of new things and we have to learn all those and see how we can solve problems better.

Two most surprising element according to me:

• The difference between my work and other IT jobs which I hear from other people.
• I knew Android is a fast pacing technology, but to my surprise, it’s much faster than I expected!

Why did you choose to be an Android Developer?

I chose this because I am very comfortable working in this field and was really excited that I can make something useful. I had played with lots of other technologies like HTML/CSS, C#, C++, C, Python, Django, and QT framework, but Android is what fascinated me. It is this fascinations that made me an Android Developer.

How do you like to spend your free time?

Frankly speaking, most of my free time goes in making apps. One such app is, Crimson Music Player. Other than that I love playing computer games. I love watching movies and TV shows. I also love Japanese Anime a lot.

What did you want to be when you were in college?

I wanted to be a developer. And that desire grew only because of the continuous encouragement by my teacher, Mousumi Bhattacharya. She encouraged our batch to take part in the Coding contests of our College’s Tech Fest which was the largest in Kolkata.

But, I was still confused in which technology and also I was not that great in solving Algorithmic problems. So I had to specialize on a platform, and after trying out quite a few, Android became my choice.

What things would you do differently in preparing for this career?

I wasted a lot of my time in starting out.

Initially, any new thing I tried made me so nervous that I couldn’t continue it. I left Web Designing, C#, QT, Python and quite a few others midway. I learnt from those mistakes and stayed with Android even though it was much more difficult.

If I get an option to go back,

I would just dive into and make peace with the fact that initially everything is confusing and makes little sense, but it’s OK.

One thing I really should have known is how we develop in a profession. Initially I thought getting it done is good enough, but I couldn’t be more wrong.

Using latest technologies, architecture, methodologies and writing good code is more important.

What other career options did you consider?

As one of my senior colleague says, we are Engineers first. So if I hadn’t been an Android developer maybe I would have probably been a web developer. But the thing is, couple of years down the line it wouldn’t matter that much. I am learning back end technologies now and hope to work on my front end skills as well. I hope Android becomes ‘one’ of my trades.

Can you please summarise your career journey?

School

• I chose science as I was a good learner with a liking for Maths and Physics but not IIT-NIT standards. Programming was not in existence because CS(Computer Science) was an optional subject.
• Scored 88% in boards and decent scores in state joint entrance.

College

Chose Computer Science as it seemed to be a safe choice that I could do well. Did not get into any good government college, but got into one of the top private ones in West Bengal.

• 1st year – Won awards in tech fest, which was a huge confidence booster. Thereafter, actively participated in college’s tech club throughout the four years.
• 2nd year – Started solving problems on Codechef .
• 3rd year – Took up Android seriously with no knowledge of Java. Made dozens of practice apps. Worked for 3 months by writing the whole physics engine myself and published a 2D game on August 2015. Received 400 downloads for which am proud of. This was a remarkable advantage for internships.
• 4th year – Persistent and TCS offered me jobs during placement. Persistent is a good company for freshers. But as they as not focused on Android, I did not accept the offer.

Started internship at Jaipur for 2 months in Jan 2016. Used to code 10-14 hours a day. It was a good learning experience. However I did not take up a full time offer as there were no experienced developers to learn from.

During the last semester, we developed an Android app to automate attendance management. Our app did the attendance calculation in seconds anytime for any student, while the teachers used to take weeks to calculate from a physical register. The code is open-sourced in my GitHub.

Career

• Started working on two remote internships. Again, learned a lot but no one to learn from.
• I reached out to a lot of startups for an Android Developer position. But I couldn’t find a job as I did not have a good portfolio to show them.
• Started working on Crimson Music player. I thought it is going to be easy, but I was wrong. Along with that I started to freelance and consult for clients. Earning was good, but learnt very less from my freelancing. So I continued my work on Crimson.
• Released Crimson Music Player in Beta on 1st October and for users on 15th October. I am very happy with the app and it has 1,28,000 lines of code. It has 41 thousand downloads with an average rating of 4.43 and is available in 14 languages.
• Got an interview call from Mutual Mobile 10 days after releasing Crimson and after 5 interviews and 2 code tests got an offer as an Associate Android Developer which I happily accepted. Working here has everything that I wanted, am able to contribute commendably. The first project I worked on had over a million downloads. No more words, just TOTALLY CONTENTED.

The Future

• I have plans to grasp Android and want to master it as much as possible. Alongside, I will learn a backend tech so that I get qualified as a full stack developer. Also I have plans to keep working on Crimson Music player and hope to reach 1 Million downloads.
• Currently am working on another app which I really have high hopes for. All these are possible only because of the great work-life balance.

Wholehearted admiration and appreciation to Mutual Mobile management team and its employees for creating an excellent work culture. Yes, we heard it from the overwhelming words of Suchandrim. This organization provides ample opportunities to learn. He showers gratitude towards his company and colleagues throughout this interview. Let its excellence inspire others as well.

Kudos to the whole unit for doing an amazing job.

– Team appleforA

People will never forget how you made them fell – Maya Angelou

You can follow Suchandrim’s blog on Medium

Part 2 – How you can become an Android Developer?