Midnight Coding for Narendra Modi & Ivanka Trump

Introduction

In 2017, GES Event was held in Hyderabad, India. Narendra Modi (the Prime Minister of India) & Ivanka Trump (daughter of the then US President Donald Trump) were the chief guests.

At that time, I was part of Invento team, and we decided to develop a new version of Mitra robot for the event.

The Challenge

We had to develop the new version of Mitra robot in a short span of time. Entire team worked day and night to meet the deadlines and finish the new version.

We went to Hyderabad from Bangalore a few days before to prepare for the event. We have cleared multiple security checks, did some demos for various people before the event.

A day before the event, around 9 PM we discovered a critical bug in the software. Due to that bug, the Robot motors were running at full speed which was dangerous. If the robot hits someone at full speed, it could cause serious injuries.

I spent a few hours debugging the issue and even tried rolling back a few versions. Still, I couldn't pinpoint the issue.

Since we need only a small set of Robot features, we decided to create a new version of the software with only limited features. I spent the next few hours creating a new release.

After that, we spent the next few hours doing extensive testing to make sure there are no bugs in the new version.

It was almost morning by the time we were done with testing. We quickly went to hotel to have some rest and get back early for the event.

Conclusion

Mitra robot welcoming Modi & Trump went very well. You can read about Balaji Viswanathan's experience at GES 2017 on Quora¹.