Internship at Elanic Bangalore - Summer 2017

Background

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Elanic is a start-up based in Bangalore, founded in 2015. Elanic’s Android and iOS application provide a platform for buying and selling pre-owned items. The focus of this platform is to make the process of earning money from pre-owned items dead simple, hence bringing more people into this market, both as sellers and buyers.

Timeline

  • Week 1: Get familiar with the existing ExpressJS backend code
  • Week 2: Implement minor bugfixes
  • Week 3-5: Take up some larger features and take it from design to implementation
  • Week 6-8: Implement the Groups feature to add a social aspect to the buying experience (think Facebook Groups)

Results

  • Implemented the Groups feature starting from scratch. It was a feature complete groups implementation with user search in groups, group search, and anti-spam capabilities. Search was implemented using ElasticSearch’s full text queries.

  • Implemented a system to filter out spam in comments based on Regex-based rules, and daily/weekly limits on the type of comments that people can post. This feature was pushed into production in June 2017 and it has reduced the spam on the app manifold.

    (People posting Checkout my closet across the app and people trying to share their phone numbers, in an attempt to circumvent the commission imposed by Elanic, were some of the types of comments that were reduced to a great extent by this spam filtering system)

  • Enabled login and signup using just a mobile number. An OTP is sent to the mobile and the user profile is bootstrapped. This reduces the barrier to joining the app, by removing steps like Email verification.

  • Fixed a bug in the order tracking apparatus. This bug was causing orders to go into an unresolvable state because of incorrect sorting order. After fixing this bug, there were no such unresolvable orders and it eased the operation of the Elanic logistics hub.

  • Designed and deployed the Ban a device from accessing the app feature. This feature is required and particularly useful in tackling bad actors on the app, who would sign up for multiple accounts from the same device in an attempt to sell fake products or scam other users.

  • Designed the Angular-based admin panel frontend for taking action on abuses that have been reported by other users of the app. Also, made significant changes to the backend to enable the new frontend to work.

Statistics

Duration: May 2017 - June 2017
Working hours (flexible): 10 am - 7 pm, 6 days a week