My first Job experience at McKinley & Rice during pandemic

Baipureddy neeraj
5 min readMay 8, 2021

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I have joined this company in February 2021 as a fresher. I’m very grateful for getting the opportunity to work at this company as my first Job. McKinley & Rice has 2 branches (Noida and Pune), I got the opportunity to work in the Pune branch, It was a bit tough initially because this is the first time I went to Pune.

About the Company

McKinley & Rice is a global tech outsourcing company with offices in Noida, Pune, Seoul & Los Angeles. They specialize in outsourcing tech solutions to brands & businesses across the globe. Here the team is lead by the experts of the industry that provide the best web development services, CMS solutions development, cross-platform application development, Recruitment Services across India, South Korea & Delaware. Being pioneers in providing cross-border e-commerce solutions called “Border Tech”.

Work Experience

Caster :

In my first 2 months, I worked on a project called Caster. It is a Korean app. And for this, I learned React Native because the app is being used by both android and ios users in South Korea. The code written in react native will get executed in both android and ios devices. Caster is a client project, the client comes up with new features and the project lead assigns us the tasks. Caster is a web-based Korean quizzing platform available on ios and android. It consists of a various number of quizzes(casts) from all trending topics around the globe in which the users can participate and test their luck. It is a content-based website used for prediction and Analysis.

This app is available in the play store and app store.

play store link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.caster

The admin will post a cast (quiz) from the admin portal which is developed using Next.js and the portal is a web app. And all the users using the app will see the cast and can answer it. So initially user will get some mic points after signing up to this app and then the user will use the mic points to play the casts(quizzes) then based on the results the user will get extra mic points. Based on the total mic points of the user there will be a ranking for each user. This makes this app more interesting. And a user can watch an Ad for around 1 minute to get extra mic points. I was assigned a task to add a new feature to this app.

So the feature that I added to this app is a referral feature i.e. in the profile screen a user can share his/her referral code and then the other user can enter the referral code in his profile screen to get some extra mic points.

The topics that I learned in react native for this project are :

  • Navigation Between Screens
  • Function Components and Class Components
  • React-Native Fundamentals (Props, state, components)
  • Building Reusable Components
  • State Management in React components
  • Reducers
  • How to handle screen layout
  • How to use API’s
  • Advanced State Management using Context
  • Redux
  • In-App Authentication

My learnings from the caster project :

  • Learned How to create a popup using Modal and react-native share to share external links with others (React-native).
  • Learned how to display ads in the web app and mobile app using Google’s AdSense and AdMob
  • Learned React Native Bridge for iOS (create a Swift class, expose it to Obj-C, then expose it to React Native)

And I worked on resolving the bugs raised by the Q/A Tester.

I worked on this project for 2 months then Due to the increase in Covid-19 cases in Maharashtra the company told all the employees to work from home, Then I came back to my home.

Code.D Chat :

After 2 months I was shifted to a new project called Code.D Chat.

The main objective of Code.D Chat is to create a community for programmers where they can chat about the technologies and also help each other by solving each other’s problems. And also one of the objectives is to give guidance by industry experts to freshers and undergraduates on how to prepare for the placements and also let them know how industries work.

So this project is created on react.js and firebase. It is a web app. As of now, there is no android app for this platform.

You can find this Web app here: https://chat.code-d.io/

So in this platform, a user will first sign in using his Gmail account. And then in explore screen user can find the existing chat rooms and can join in any of the chat rooms in which he/she is interested and start chatting. And also a user can create a chat room and share the URL with others and invite them to join the chat room as well.

Some amazing features of Code.D Chat are :

  1. Search bar in explore screen where a user can search the chat rooms based on title.
  2. Filter feature (A user can filter the chat rooms based on 3 options i.e. Daily Best, Newest, and Popular).
  3. And bookmark feature (A user can bookmark a member and can see the bookmarked member list in his/her profile screen).

So far many developers and programmers joined this platform and recently we on boarded around 11 universities to this platform.

If you are a programmer and want to showcase your skills by helping others and need help from industry experts then this the right platform for you. Link to the platform : https://chat.code-d.io/

So for in this project, I learned :

  • React.js
  • Firestore cloud functions (onCreate(), onDelete() and onUpdate()).
  • Algolia API documentation for search bar functionality and Sort by feature functionality.

To sum it up it was a great experience, I learned a lot in these 4 months and I want to continue my learning and increase my knowledge in this company.

I would like to thank Keshav tooteja, Hemprasad Badgujar (Tech Lead), and Rishabh Jain for guiding me and helping me in these projects.

I am thank full to all my professors at Bennett University and Deepak Garg for making me industry-ready.

Thanks to you for reading my blog .

BAIPUREDDY NEERAJ ,
Graduate Engineer Trainee at McKinley & Rice
BENNETT UNIVERSITY

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