Vikash Agrawal talks about his developer journey from college to working for startups and then currently working for Amazon.

He currently works as a front-end engineer at Amazon. Prior to that he was working as a team lead at Housing.com and engineering lead at Dream  11, both of which are prominent startups in India. He also did Google  Summer of Code in 2011, 2012, and 2013.

We discuss topics such as what made him get into programming, the role of communities and mentors in his life, and how to reach out to approach mentors with questions.

We also discuss about resources that he uses to keep himself updated about the latest know-how's of the development world and how he approaches depth vs breadth when consuming content as well as his approach to generalization vs specialization in general and how it varies according to the stage of the career that a developer is in.

Vikash also shares his experiences working at startups and compares them to his corporate experience at Amazon. And we touch a bit more on  Amazon's leadership principles and their importance.

Discord server link: https://discord.gg/cE7q4qr8tY

0:00 Intro

1:01 About Vikash

2:01 Motivations to get into Programming?

6:36 Factors that led to success

9:35 Role of mentors

12:28 How to approach mentors

15:14 Resources you consume for learning

19:18 Breadth vs depth when learning

23:00 Experience working at startups vs corporate

27:33 Amazon's leadership principles

31:04 Move fast and break things vs perfection