How my internship at Gramener turned comical

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Hi, I am Kriti Rohilla. It has been three months now since I started my first job as a Software Developer Intern at Gramener. One of the projects I’ve been working on –
Comicgen data comics – recently got released for everyone to use. There couldn’t be a better time to write about my journey so far.

Who am I ?

I am a final year B.E. student at UIET, Panjab University, pursuing a Bachelor’s in computer science. I am currently doing my Internship with Gramener – A Data Science Company. During our final semester, we are advised to do a six-month technical internship. I was placed in another firm through campus placements. But, I decided to work for Gramener instead.

During the interview process, I got the chance to interact with people from Gramener. I asked them many questions related to their work and culture. I found the work here rather interesting and challenging. At that time, I wasn’t quite sure if I should take this leap. But now that I am here, I really feel like I made the right choice.

Working with Gramener

Gramener is a Design-led Data Science Company. Its vision is to narrate data-driven insights as stories. The objective is to make complex data comprehensive and consumable through insights told through stories. Why? Because stories live forever.

This reminds me of the first idea I was exposed to at Gramener. As students, we are only concerned about getting the code up and running. If it does give an output that we expect, it is probably the best thing that could happen. Well in the real world, this is where the story actually begins.

Thinking like an end-user is something that course books often fail to teach. It often takes multiple iterations to get the approach right. Next comes the part of getting appropriate results, which is also vital for developers in the long term. The code which is written today often either gets used by you or others months or years later. The clean and understandable code saves a lot of time and effort as against writing everything from scratch.

Another cool thing about working here is a friendly and cooperative environment. Team members respond quickly to the questions I ask and help me in learning prerequisites in completing the task assigned. Developers do have a common slogan that says “Google it!” whenever they are stuck. But having people around you who can help you quickly get out of a fix is even better. That also warns us about what is coming next. Having like-minded individuals around who are goal-oriented and result-driven surely pushes you to get out of your comfort zone and accomplish great things.

Fun learning with data comics

Here it comes. As I mentioned above, one of my projects got deployed. It feels good to help in building something actually useful for people. The product is Comicgen, a library built with JavaScript to create comics. The catch is that you don’t need to create comics because that is what Comicgen will do for you.

Yes, you read me right. You don’t have to draw a single line. You don’t need to put in a lot of effort to make your characters appealing. All this is already made available for you to use right away. It uses only two lines of code to get started, that loads the library and flashes a fascinating character for you. We christened our data comics characters cum buddies Dey and Dee.

You can easily customize their emotions and body postures to suit the requirements of your story. You can also use the API to run comicgen on a selector of your choice. You can combine multiple characters as one SVG element in a panel to create a composition of your choice. Change the x, y, width, height, mirror and scale to position each character accordingly. It also provides comic-caption-top and comic-caption-bottom class utilities to add captions inside a comic-panel.

Here’s an example of how we tried to create a small story with the comical characters on the USA birth data.

Do give it a try here yourself. I am sure you will love it.

When I was included in the team for working on this project, I was very thrilled upon hearing the idea and at the same time felt challenged because of not having any experience with Javascript.

While working on Comicgen, I bugged my team members every now and then asking for help. They are always friendly and supportive. Now that this project is out on the internet, it feels quite funny to think that I can actually write JS code even though I know there is a long way to go.

Do let me know how did you like comicgen. Your suggestions and feedback will help Dee, Dey & us produce better stories.

Note: This story is written by Kriti Rohilla, the Product Intern at Gramener. Kriti also helped in creating Comicgen.