How did it all start?
My story of discovering this company and my hidden coding talents began with a phone call to my batchmate, to talk about a bug in my college final-year project with which I was breaking my head at for weeks. I knew Leonard from my school days. Coincidentally, we were together in the same squadron in the NCC as well. We've had some fun times in the NCC. 
A blast from our past in the NCC.
Like in any uniformed force, we get to forge our relationships with friends, or in other words "batchmates" in the NCC over our tenure, and during one such instance of our aeromodelling post-flight maintenance, we were talking about college and coding and Leonard had told me that he knows web development well and has a small startup which does web development. With my final year project's bug, when I struggling to find solutions, I reached out to many of my friends, and one in one such attempt, I made a call to Leonard and he told me to bring my project to his house so that he'd take a look at it. My project was pretty basic, and that basic project took me about a month to build. Upon reaching Leonard's house, he took a brief look at my code, looked at me, and asked me "You know what? This is too messed up to fix, we'll do the same project in a fresh codebase in a much-optimized way" and I was confused and scared because this project took me almost a month to build, I was worried because I thought I'll have to take another month to finish this project. But to my surprise, within 4 hours, my entire final year project came to life, exactly in the way I had described in the abstract. I kid you not, I was awestruck! For 4 hours straight, I saw Leonard typing at blazing speeds and shifting screens like Keanu reeves in the matrix.
I WANTED TO DO THAT TOO!
I asked him if he could teach me, and he said "I'm looking to hire an intern at my company, would you be interested?" - By now, you could have guessed what my answer would have been.
My First Step
A microphone, a Discord sign up, infinite cups of coffee and a month or two is what it took for me to understand the work that's been put to deploy a project out there to the clients (spoiler alert, it's much vast than what you learn in college). My quest from learning basic HTML to getting to develop complex frontends and backends using robust frameworks is what this blog is all about, in other words, My journey from a zero to hero in coding!
I care not to take back my words when I say 'You too, can learn all that's offered from scratch'. All that we at icrewsystems look for in you is the willpower to go on, the perseverance, the patience to tackle problems, and to never quit. icrewsystems gives it's interns the environment to grow as a person and I should say, it's not a fan of strict grumpy faces and dictatorship regulations but compromising on time & quality is something we don't overlook.
We begin with a guide, documentation and you get the credentials to perform your operations. You gain access to the portal where your progress gets recorded. You have the support of your fellow interns to give you a boost in whatever you do. You get to learn all the basics in the beginning with the help of the Gods of learning web development (i.e) "Google and YouTube".
Front-end development with HTML, CSS, JS, etc that you will normally be able to comprehend. You might be familiar with most of the topics that come under this Chapter. These two are the core for any website to be presented with a structure and customization. Starting with these can only make your journey much much better. as you stroll in the streets of HTML and CSS, you will come across some boosters like Bootstrap, Tailwind-CSS, CSS grid, Flexbox, React etc that will make your work easier. The Web pages that you had a crush on has all these things going on behind it.
Speaking of Back-end, we mostly focus on PHP, a general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. Almost all the famous websites you know has PHP, starting from WordPress to Facebook and it's free!
i should say, it might take a while to understand what's going on but as you take your steps one step at a time you'll find it to be quite easy and interesting. The point here is to not "just write meaningful code" but to code "the way the user/client will understand the content" which brings the concept of refactoring and creating a structure for the code rather than hard-coding it. That's what sets aside an exceptional code from the other ones.
As you go on to learn PHP and as you stand firm on its basics we transcend you to Laravel, an open-source PHP web framework that makes your work easier than you can imagine. I still remember when i spent hours to create a Login-Register form in vanilla PHP but when i learnt Laravel it took less than half an hour to get it done. The videos that we suggest comes from Laracasts, a defacto educational resource specifically for working developers building the web with PHP and JavaScript. It's kinda like Netflix for your career! As you look at all the videos that we recommend, we stand by you when you need help. You experience a sense of accomplishment as you get to do things on your own which strives you to get more work done.
I had lots of fun in exploring "how" the modern sites are made. I remember the day when I first wrote my "hello world" program, and now I'm writing this blog while finishing up complex API integration and documentation. The transition phase from training to production was a little challenging at first, it was hard, not going to lie, but during the entire training period, you're mentally built to accept that "just because it's hard, it doesn't mean it's impossible". The exciting part about icrewsystems is that you're given the opportunity to work on overseas projects. I've had the privilege to work on projects from Barbados, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Bulgaria, and Romania. I got the chance to interact with people from all of those countries, and that is an experience very hard to get. While I was working here, my colleagues got chances to work in projects from Ireland, China, Japan, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and so on.
"All work and no play makes jack a dull dud", right?
Yes, We work hard, but we play harder!
We are much more than just "sit, stand, roll-over" company, we're a "fly, raft, slay" kind of a company, yes you heard me right. We take some time to appreciate ourselves with some unforgettable trips. Our work is as beautiful as the relationship that we share within the workforce of icrewsystems. We believe that productive work is a result of an unbreakable bond and limitless learning. Take a look at some of our memorable moments.
From the time when we went for flying at Bangalore
From the time we went for Rafting at Kalpakkam 
Some team dinners, and fancy get-away breakfasts all over the map! 
Sometimes, the work environment can be stressful when a lot of work is accumulated. Normal people panic but we "Web Artisans" at icrewsystems handle it differently. Ours is a place that is more like a bunch of friends helping out each other but just in a much more professional way. Our community is loaded with a diverse variety of people, developers aren't just geeks, they also beatbox, play the guitar like a pro, rap, vibe over different genres of music, cook delicious food, artists and can make the workplace a wonderful time.
My Journey so far
I still remember my first ever call with a client from overseas. Well, it was an irony because he had the same name as mine. Dealing with clients and handling their queries was the best part. You get to work with clients across the globe. Literally, we have clients from all continents. You'll get to work on diverse projects as your clients vary from time to time, I've worked on Virtual Airline projects like Skywardair and VirtualNato which gave me a lot of interest to work on, speaking of which I've also got the opportunity to work on #Feedthepoor project
The #feedThePoor App is a project which emphasizes on the main goal to increase the transparency in donating and to attract more donors and not let an underprivileged human starve to death. As we are blessed with the gift to code, we use it for a better cause, and being a part of it is something that I am indefinitely proud of. You as an intern will get these perks too.
To conclude
So, you might think that it takes extraordinary skills to even crack the interview and get into icrewsystems, right? You're absolutely right, it does take something extraordinary. The staff here don't care about your coding skills, because I've seen it first hand, they can teach anyone to code. They are more interested in hiring character than talent. Luckily, my character was identified, and I was given the privilege to learn code in a better way. If you have read this entire blog and are thinking about how it would be if you too could be a part of icrewsystems, stop thinking and write to hello@icrewsystems.com with your CV That's the best decision you'll ever make today.
See you on the other side.
