Tech Talks at Dineout — In Conversation with Lead Engineer, Prakhar Agarwal

This blog post is a part of our interview series “Tech Talks at Dineout” where we talk about and to the great bunch of engineers at Dineout and understand their work, their experience, and their journey at Dineout.

Prakhar is a lead engineer at Dineout. He has been working here for 2.5 years. He contributes to Dineout’s B2C android app. He recently got promoted as a lead engineer at Dineout. Prakhar has also worked with the inresto team in Bangalore in 2020.

Before Dineout, Prakhar Co-founded ‘Binge Digital’- A food discovery platform and ran the startup for nearly two years. He headed the technology department there. The startup’s functionality was similar to Dineout’s. In 2019, the team from Binge Digital met Dineout’s founders. The founders of Dineout thought that Prakhar’s team would be a good addition to Dineout. Prakhar and his team were asked to join Dineout, making Binge Digital one of Dineout’s acquisitions.

After graduating as a computer science engineer, he worked in the e-commerce industry for a brief period of 6 months as an android engineer. Prakhar is passionate about teaching and is a part-time teacher. He currently grooms students in software development. He actively takes workshops too for young engineers.

Favourite food: Anything from the Indian or Italian cuisine

The food you want to explore: More Mexican food.

How is your new job role working out?

There has been a slight change in the way I approach work now. I need to take care of the team as well now. There are decisions that need to be made like, what features to build, what not to build, how much time would it take, the estimated timeline, and more. There are lots of discussions with the product, design and backend teams. Well, the juniors need to be guided as well to follow a certain kind of architecture.

After getting promoted, I think the main focus areas shifted from just writing code to optimising the code and having a proper process with good architecture.

So, Prakhar, tell us what got you interested in this field?

I think all the credit goes to my teacher. During my school days, I had an amazing computer science teacher who would take the effort to explain programming. She would explain everything so well that we fell in love with the subject and the topic. When I left school, I kind of knew that I like to code and would most probably do it for quite some time in my career. It is one of those things that I don’t get tired or bored of. When I code, I am in a flow. I can code straight for 10+ hours and this is not what I feel I can do with other subjects.

I feel if you can do something for a long stretch of time without getting bored of it, then you might want to choose that for your career. So when I was contemplating the career choices I thought, I liked coding. I’m good at it. And I know the basics and this is the thing that I really enjoy. So I then pursued computer science engineering, and I think it was the right decision.

I can code for hours. Coding still thrills and interests me. The day it stops being enjoyable for me, I guess I will make a career switch.

You told us already about how you got into Dineout, anything regarding that that you want to tell us?

My entry into Dineout was more of a return of an exceptional case. I did not certainly have this in mind. Since my team and I were also solving issues for diners it was natural of us to cross paths with Dineout. I might say this was more of destiny and a ‘by-chance’ type of hire/employment. I think the founders here were very generous to invite us to join their team. It was an interesting turn of events for us for being at the right place and at the right time.

Favourite project

I am currently working on the android application. I liked working on ‘Dine-In: The contactless ordering platform’ with the inresto team. The inresto team is fabulous. I worked closely with the senior team and revamped the UI in 3 months.

Also, my favourite part about working with Dineout is seeing our projects come to life. Like I see a lot of restaurants using our QR code feature. If you visit a restaurant and you see a QR code over there and you’re scanning it for the menu onto your phone, one-third of the time it is likely that it will be ours. It is a good feeling seeing the work by the team out there. And it is always fun and nice to see friends ask for offers and restaurant suggestions whenever we are planning to meet.

What does your average day at Dineout look like?

Since it is work from home, my work comparatively starts a little late, at around 10 am. So we normally start with our sprint meeting to check on our progress and what would be the next few things we would be working on. The first half of the day is usually a lot of development work whereas, the second half is reserved for planning and delivering things to the QA team.

I think the best thing about working here is the flexibility of picking out projects that we like and are willing to work on. There is a lot of personal growth involved here. Everyone carves their own unique journey here. Though I am an android developer primarily I was given the opportunity to work on React Native and Angular, work with the inresto team in Bangalore and more.