On the 1st day of Eid, 10th of July, in the morning, I got a call from my manager.
He asked me to cancel all the orders except the Eid ones. I thought that maybe we got more orders than we were expecting. Right after that call, I got another call from our Platform Integrity Lead, he told me that the Eid orders were not landing on the warehouses and shared a video call link to join.
I joined the link. Our Senior Architect, my manager and teammates from the operations team were already there. The orders were not landing.
We started triaging the issue. While doing so, my manager called me separately and asked me to call him later when the issue is fixed as he would like to discuss something important.
My first thought was:
Maybe I did something wrong
My Second thought was:
Maybe I did something right
I got back to the other call and we started discussing the immediate solution. In a few minutes, we had an order landed on the warehouse. Due to it being Eid, we decided to proceed with this immediate solution and replicate it for all the other orders. The solution was decided. It basically made the orders ready for the riders to be picked in the system.
I got off from the call, in early evening. Of course, I forgot to callback my manager.
The 2nd day of Eid, it was the same issue. We already expected it but the severity was low, and we did the same thing as we did for the orders of the 1st day. And the same happened on the 3rd day with even lower severity.
I won’t discuss what the issue was. Issues like this arise every now and then and the team being collectively available, regardless of the occasion of Eid is all that matters. On the 3rd day, in the morning, I remembered my manager asking me to call him back and I did.
He told me that there was a bad news. I knew I had done something wrong (It’s just me overthinking). He asked me to switch to a video call. We did, and he told me that which I never expected.
We are dissolving Airlift.
I remember asking him if it was a prank call. I remember him mentioning some other things which just went over my head. We didn’t talk much afterwards, only a minute or so and I asked him to talk in person at night. I asked that so that I can cut the call as early as possible.
I sat down for a while and thought a lot, a lot of things.
It was a very quite 3rd day of Eid. Throughout the day I had hundreds of thoughts. Eventually the rumors started coming in and eventually we got an official company wide call at night on the same day.
It was real.
What was Airlift Link to heading
Most people will tell you that:
Airlift was one of the first quick commerce grocery delivery service in Pakistan. They had their own supply chain, their own last mile, their own retail operations and more.
That’s all true. We had everything of our own.
But above all, what Airlift was, was actually a phenomenon of Culture.
A culture where:
Every person was building something huge, part of the dream.
Every person would always be available albeit they had unlimited leaves.
Every person was as helping to the other team as they were to their own team.
Every person had their own charm through which they were recognized.
Every person was 1% better everyday, literally.
Every person had an impact, a huge impact.
Every person was the owner.
I can go on and on and the definition of this Culture will never be complete. This is true not only for the Engineering Team. This is true for every single team at Airlift, The People Strategy Team, The Product Team, The Business Team, The Operations Team, The Platform Integrity Team, every single team.
When I embark on my new journey, this culture is what I’m most afraid I might not find.
The Dream & Legacy Link to heading
When I joined Airlift back in 2020, we were doing around 1000 orders per day. When we closed, we had once peaked 40000 orders per day. We were living the dream.
Between 1000 and 40000 was the sense of serving the people, of helping them in their daily lives, of having an impact, one which they would remember and come back to.
Between 1000 and 40000, we went international. We went to South Africa. This was really the time we realized the impact of our work as a team. We were ready to launch into any country.
Our impact was global.
Between 1000 and 40000, we scaled. We learned to produce a highly scalable and optimized codebase. From the ground up, our features were thought of for the global consumer base and not for a specific country.
We were finally living the dream, the dream of having a meaningful impact in the daily lives of people around the globe.
The legacy of this dream as dreamt by all Airliftians will remain forever.
It remains in the the people that composed it in the first place.
Throughout my life at Airlift, I met people who lived and breathed this dream and culture. They are far more capable then producing Airlift. And so, wherever they will go, the dream shall live on.
Experience of a Lifetime Link to heading
Airlift was my first job.
Job is really not the right word.
Airlift was the first idea, a part of which I owned.
For turning this idea into a reality, I became part of a team that had unparalleled experience and enthusiasm for technology. My technical learnings aside, Airlift provided me with exposure that I could not have imagined to acquire at my age.
I had a playground to experiment and create an impact on our architecture and features.
A plethora of technical interviews to conduct (which helped me a lot).
A big calendar to plan, schedule and manage.
An open space to contribute to whichever domain I was interested in.
A platform to voice my opinions without the fear of feedback and one to listen from the experiences of more than a hundred engineering veterans.
An environment where my achievements were celebrated on the red carpet and the failures, dismissed with a constructive feedback.
A university with a great knowledgebase to learn and grow from.
To say the least, Airlift enabled me in many dimensions.
There were no hard and fast rules. Only your skills and will to learn and grow. And the way Airlift helped me in these throughout my almost 2 years, is a debt I won’t be able to pay.