Bewakoof.com, My First Tech Gig, Long Hours, Big Success!

Every college student in India with a taste for quirky fashion knew Bewakoof.com. I was a huge fan myself! Their T-shirt designs were legendary – the kind that sparked conversations. So, imagine my excitement when, fresh out of graduation and after a few internships, I landed a full-time software engineer role there. My first "real" job, and at a brand I genuinely admired! Little did I know I was stepping into a whirlwind of high-speed growth, intense challenges, and one of the most rewarding experiences of my early career.

Bewakoof.com was on a mission. They had recently secured Venture Capital funding and were looking to scale, and scale fast. This meant new teams, new ideas, and a whole lot of energy. I was drafted into the newly formed "Engagement Team." The interesting part? Pretty much all of us on this team, including the product managers, were new to Bewakoof. It was like starting a new adventure together, within a company that was itself leveling up.

Now, as a fresh graduate, my experience with massive, sprawling projects was, let's say, theoretical. Bewakoof.com wasn't just a website; it was an ecosystem – Android app, mobile site, web platform, vendor portals, buyer interfaces... the works! Suddenly, I was looking at a scale I’d never engineered for. Building projects from scratch during internships is one thing; diving into a live, complex system with thousands of users is a whole different ball game. How do you even begin to handle that kind of scale? Honestly, it was a bit "सर चकराने वाला" (mind-boggling) at first.

Our Engagement Team had a clear North Star metric: boost user engagement. Get people to spend more time on the app, use it more often, and basically, fall even more in love with the Bewakoof experience. We started with a few smaller projects, familiarizing ourselves with the existing systems, routing things here and there, building smaller features – the usual "getting your hands dirty" phase.

After about a month or two, our Product Manager dropped the big one: "We're building a gaming system." The goal was to skyrocket engagement. Before this major undertaking, I’d worked on a "scrolling wheel" – you know, the spin-the-wheel kind of feature for rewards, which was a good learning experience in itself and helped drive some user activity. But a full-fledged gaming platform, internally codenamed "bFun"? I had no idea how to build something like that from a frontend perspective in such a large ecosystem. It was a massive engineering challenge staring me right in the face.

This is where the real "मेहनत" (hard work) began. As a junior frontend developer on the bFun project, every day was a learning curve shaped like a vertical line. I took all the help I could get from my seniors. We faced so many engineering hurdles – tricky routing issues, "access denied" roadblocks that made you want to pull your hair out, authentication complexities across different platforms. Because the project was new and integrated with so many existing parts, I had to deep-dive into almost every corner of Bewakoof's tech stack. My days stretched into 16, sometimes 17, hours. Building a project of this complexity, especially when you're learning the ropes of a large system, is incredibly tough.

Our bFun team was a mix of energies and expertise: a senior software engineer and a junior on the backend, another frontend engineer, and myself as a junior frontend dev, plus a UI developer, our PM, and an APM. We were all in it together, pushing to get bFun out on deadline. (You mentioned a URL for the project, if you have a demo or an archived link, you could say something like: "It was a beast of a project, and you might even find traces or mentions of it if you search for Bewakoof's 'bFun' gaming initiative from around that time [or add placeholder link here if you have one].")

After countless hurdles, experiments, iterations, and a lot of "chai-fueled" late nights, we finally launched bFun! The relief was immense. But the real celebration came shortly after. The entire Engagement Team, and specifically the bFun project, received an award from the company! Our backend seniors also played a huge part, of course; they built the backbone that made it all possible.

That award was more than just a trophy. For me, the person who started out not knowing how to tackle such technical mountains, to see our project recognized, to have overcome those challenges, was incredibly validating and deeply appreciating. It was a "kya baat hai!" (Wow, amazing!) moment.

My first job at Bewakoof.com was a trial by fire. It taught me about scale, about the relentless pace of a high-growth startup, the importance of teamwork when everyone is new and learning, and most importantly, it taught me that with enough determination (and many, many hours), even the most daunting technical challenges can be overcome. It was an experience that truly shaped my early career.