Ganesh Raskar: A geek who went from college dropout to Azure expert

What if we tell you that a college-dropout who joined Rapid Circle five years back as an intern is now working in building some of the most complex solutions? Meet Ganesh Raskar, a Cloud Consultant, who is popularly known for his strong technical skills and discipline ensuring smooth shipping of code even in the rockiest of environments. Read on to know more about him.

Can you tell us about your current role and project?

Though my primary role is of data engineer, I am playing multiple roles. Apart from data engineering, I am involved in developing DevOps pipelines and developing APIs as a back-end engineer. This project has given me an opportunity to learn new things and wear multiple hats.

How did you come to know about Rapid Circle?

This is an interesting story. I was a Microsoft Student Partner back in college. I participated in one of the competitions with my half-baked project which was a Library Management System where I met Sanket Ghorpade (current colleague at Rapid Circle). Fast-forward to a year, I had to drop out of college due to some personal reasons and was looking for a job. I called Sanket if he knew any company. It was from him I got to know about Rapid Circle. After some research about the company, few phone calls and days later, I was in front of Suyog Patki, with my broken English and visible nervousness.

What was your first live project? How did that help you in future projects?

Suyog wanted to build a tool called People Planner for an internal process for people capacity and bench planning. This was my first live project. Though internal, this tool was to be used by RC project managers. I got an opportunity to use AngularJS framework which was quite famous back then (2016) for front-end, and build .NET MVC web API. For authentication and authorization, I used Azure AD. As it was a multi-role application, I leveraged Azure AD app role which was new and complicated at that time, to implement RBAC.

This project helped shape me my technical career. It taught me to choose between technologies, which services to use, how to architect them, how to develop APIs etc. All this helped me in designing systems, realizing the problems and fixing it. It also taught some very important life lessons like never ever make changes to your code just before the demo, and never play in production environment; you could potentially delete the entire database.

What challenges you faced and how did you overcome it?

Honestly for me, communication used to be my biggest challenge. I realize now that I used to be good working as single contributor. When working in teams, especially a new team, it takes time to adjust with team’s way of working or may get intimidated by your fellow team members. But with help of my colleagues and mentors like Omkar Khair, I understood how important it is to communicate your problem areas and raising flags at an early stage. This learning has helped me immensely in working with different teams.

How different of a person you are now as compared to when you joined?

I am a totally different person now, ha ha! I was a total introvert, hardly spoke to anyone, used to get aggressive when debating. I have now become more patient, I respect people’s opinion even if I don’t agree, and I try to learn from everyone. I read this one line in some book and it struck me hard- “Everybody knows something that you don’t”. I think my colleagues and mentors around me played a big role in bringing this change. Can’t thank them enough!

Can you recall some of your best memories working here?

I think for me, going live with People Planner is still the best memory so far. There was a huge sense of achievement when I hit rock bottom in my personal space.

What do you aim to achieve now, technology-wise?

When I look back at my five years working in Rapid Circle, I have gained enough confidence of learning any technology and commit to deliver it. In my current project, I learned Azure Data Factory and implemented in a month’s time. So, more than technology, I want to up my game by mentoring others the way I got mentored here. That will give me more satisfaction than learning a new technology.