Berty Thomas owes his career successes to moonlighting. He was working as a business analyst at financial services company Barclays in May 2021, when India opened up Covid-19 vaccinations for all adults. People were struggling to get vaccination slots in the government’s CoWin platform. Thomas decided to use his love for programming to write a script over CoWin’s public Application Programming Interface (API) to help identify available slots for specific age groups. He decided to run the script on the server that would issue alerts as soon as slots were available at a nearest vaccination centre. His platform, under45.in, added people to relevant Telegram groups in their areas.

Thomas agrees that “it was round-the-clock work”, where his day started before sunrise, and went on until almost midnight. He would juggle work commitments and scheduled meetings, and take stock of alerts, messages and server-side issues on the under45.in platform. As of July 1, 2021, under45.in was being used in 675-odd districts across the country and had 41 lakh subscribers, and helped many people book slots and access Covid-19 vaccinations.

What was required on his part, Thomas says, was complete transparency with his company, which did not have a problem with his programming as it did not clash with his duties or priorities at work. His colleagues also encouraged his work and covered for him at times when required.

“Moonlighting is the only way you can upskill yourself, learn new things and...

Read Full Story: https://www.forbesindia.com/article/take-one-big-story-of-the-day/should-it-c...