Vik Ramanujam
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Technical full-stack Lead, Barcelona
I like building things.
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::: section introduction
Excuse me, but, there's a container for that :)
A battle-hardened technologist interested in building beautiful, large-scale and user-friendly web and mobile applications. ♥ functional programming, full-stack coding, optimising infrastructure, the command line & Vim. When not behind the keyboard, I'm cooking, travelling or professing my undying love to micro-containers.
♥ building teams that deliver great, pixel-perfect, usable products & getting my hands dirty with code when duty calls. I care deeply about the people I work with. I bring a never say die attitude to the team and ensure that everyone is pushing code of the highest quality. ♥ writing tests & teach as much as I learn.
e: vik@ramanuj.am t: +34612509305 w: https://vik.ramanuj.am | GitHub | LinkedIn
I do
Full-stack Web Development & DevOps & Developer Experience.
I wield
Python, React, Nodejs, Docker, Ansible, Terraform, MongoDB.
I speak
English, Tamil, Malay, Beginner Level Spanish (badly) & Portuguese and Klingon.
I like
Music, Yoga, Movies & Series, Intermittent fasting, Running, Reading.
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::: section slides-and-talks
Talks and Slides
- How I stopped worrying and started loving the build system.
- Going offline-first with CouchDB.
- Build a living style guide using React, Storybook & Styled-components.
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::: section education
Education
Class of '98 GCE O' Levels
Maz International School, Kuala Lumpur
- Advanced Math & Science major
1998 - 2000 Ontario Diploma Program
Taylor's College, Kuala Lumpur
- Finite Math, Calculus, Algebra, Computing, Chemistry, Physics.
2000 - 2003 Bachelors of Software Engineering
University of Sheffield, UK
- Computer science, Software architecture, design, and user experience.
- Dissertation: Neilson's Usability Heuristics on the World Wide Web.
- Dropped out, took a break, travelled.
2003 - 2004 Graduated with a Bachelors in Computing
University of Staffordshire
- Final Year Project: Collaborative text editor where team members can see code edited by others in real time, complete with a chat system.
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::: section work-experience
Work Experience
Jan 2021 - Present Senior Engineer
Travelperk, Barcelona | Spain
Revolutionising business travel, making real-life connections happen. I focus on full-stack development, performance enhancements, DevOps and DevEx.
Terraform at work, terraform at home.
Infrastructure / Backend / Frontend / Developer Experience
- Spearheaded core architectural changes to Travelperk's Engineering infrastructure, from the backend to the frontend resulting in improved performance and scalability
- Proactively mitigated recurring critical incidents, enhancing product scalability and reducing risks for hypergrowth
- Led the sharing of Redis improvements with the tribe, optimized Elasticache usage by implementing gzip compression, TTL optimizations, averting potential outages, and ensuring system stability
- Improved various monitors and alerts to ensure system health is always monitored, making it easier for L1 & L2 level support to respond to incidents
- Improved developer experience and product quality by enhancing Docker builds, reducing latency, timeout errors in various tornado based services
- Improved log access via a CLI tool built using Node, and later Golang to download, parse, and search transactional logs from S3
- Strengthened communication with the product team by initiating regular contact, fostering a collaborative relationship, and enhancing understanding and teamwork.
- Diligently monitored and supported multiple domains, ensuring accurate implementation of Service Level Objectives and contributing to enhanced reliability and stability
- Involved daily with full-stack work in Python/Django, React, Docker, Terraform, Redis & more
- Optimized base Docker images and developed and maintained CircleCI Orbs to standardize and streamline the CI/CD process, resulting in shaving minutes off build times & increased efficiency
- Implemented quality of life improvements using caching, parallelization, and other techniques to speed up how fast Travelperk serves its content
- Optimised core parts of the application, ranging from the database to the frontend, in one case reducing load times from 7 seconds to 1.5 seconds when searching for hotels
- Led the effort to move the frontend to a monorepo, using PNPM, that paved the way for micro-frontends
- Co-Led the effort to implement Turborepo to speed up development and reduce build times in the frontend
- Involved in Travelperk's design system, using Storybook, Styled-components & React
- Involved in most guilds and hackathons over the past 3 years
Mar 2019 – December 2020 Senior Front-end Engineer
888Holdings, Dublin | Ireland
Delivered, ahead of time, two web applications weilding React 16.8+, Redux, Hooks, Styled-components and newer concepts in front-end development.
That should become a hook!
- Implemented boilerplate-free state management using minimal code, but tested Redux architecture to easily build web applications.
- Increased code quality across teams, setup code standards, lint rules.
- Pushed system-side improvements & fixes that increase stability and use core concepts like context, hooks and higher-order components.
- Setup new build system for React based apps of tomorrow.
- Promoted component re-usability & setup icons/assets/theme to have a single source of truth.
- Involved with UX team to create mobile-friendly and performant web applications.
- Mentored other front-end developers on how to build future-proof front-end software.
- Introduced cross-team pull-requests and reviews to increase transparency and developer involvement.
- Addressed pain-points of the development process, avoiding pitfalls and increased overall output by ensuring teams share code and knowledge, outpacing the rate at which work was coming in.
- Held workshops and tutorials to show developers best practices in front-end development like writing performant code and debugging.
- Addressed technical debt across the system from build to production whilst improving developer experience.
- Updated core modules such as Webpack, React and introduced the teams to newer technologies like styled-components and hooks.
- Seen as the go-to person for other developers who require advice on an upcoming issue they're working on.
Dec 2017 – October 2018 Front-end Technical Lead
BAE Systems Applied Intelligence | Kuala Lumpur
Leading a team of Front-end developers tasked with building a next-generation product using React / Redux / RxJS / Styled Components, Storybook using ES7 that focuses on big-data, drill-downs, geolocation & clustering, Elastic Search, GraphQL and Docker (♥) amongst other technologies.
That button is 1 pixel too low.
Jun 2016 - Dec '17 Front-end Team Lead
BAE Systems Applied Intelligence | Kuala Lumpur
Engineered a web app built on Angular, ES7/8, SCSS, Angular Material that runs of 30 different browser/device combinations from Retina displays to mobile browsers, weeks ahead of schedule.
- Led a team of ten developers to deliver, ahead of schedule a web application & mobile app which strict acceptance criteria for performance in low bandwidth areas.
- Engaged with UX daily to ensure delivery of a usable and slick-looking product, advising against bad user experience and convoluted user journeys.
- Evaluated requirements with Business Analysts to ensure stories are short, well-worded with clear acceptance criteria and most importantly, closeable.
- Spearheaded a culture of writing good code with performance and usability as pillars.
- Planned sprints and delegated tasks across the front-end team, and delivering features 4-5 sprints ahead of schedule.
- Promoted reusability and configurability by building a library of UX components within the first couple of sprints - resulting in minimal to no effort necessary to implement features at the later stages.
- Involved heavily in code-reviews and (declining) pull-requests that would take the easy way out, have bad tests, or lack code comments - delivered with 90% test coverage when expected baseline was 80%.
- Streamlined team output by using an assembly-line mindset when managing task delegation. We closed every sprint by delivering impressive work, consistently, keeping morale and confidence high.
- Automated repetitive DevOps and pushed the mobile apps to the Apple/Google stores with one command using fastlane.
I am a higher-order function. We all are.
Dec 2015 – Apr '16 Lead Front-end Developer
BAE Systems Applied Intelligence | Kuala Lumpur
- Delivered dashboards consisting of heat-maps, filters, timelines and drill-down hunting using Highcharts / Highmaps / Angular / SASS that would interface with an elastic search back end.
- Accelerated development of a pixel-perfect product with a strict delivery timeline, whilst keeping a focus on best practices.
- Undertook the interviewing and hiring of a capable (and super-awesome) front-end development team, which I would lead, that could deliver complex and interesting projects.
- Formulated a guide of best-practices in building good software for the front-end developers.
Sep 2014 – Jul '15 UI Developer
Lavaboom | Cologne Area, Germany (remote work)
- Built a next-gen encrypted email client for Lavaboom, a start-up from Cologne, Germany.
- Engineered a pixel-perfect (yes, I use that word a lot!) email front-end with rich-text composing and multiple inboxes using Jade (now known as Pug), Gulp, ES6, Angular, Bootstrap & SASS
- Generated an icon font automatically from SVG files provided by UX
The project is open-sourced at https://github.com/lavab
Jan 2008 – Dec '15 Senior Web Developer / Co-Founder
Dark Brown & Yellow Creative House
- Developed and streamlined various projects ranging from corporate websites for public listed companies to big players in the For-ex market.
- Implemented various intranet collaboration tools for governmental organizations, with departmental access control.
- Ensured a bullet-proof future for all projects using web standards and stage-0 Javascript.
- Build a reputation of delivering, unique, funky and creative products that stand out from the crowd.
2004 - '08 Various positions held
IT Manager / Software Consultant / Point-of-sale & ERP specialist / Proof-of-concept architect.
Do have a look at my LinkedIn profile if you'd like to find out more of my early career.
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::: section likes
Likes
- Functional Programming
- Vertical rhythm
- CI
- Pink Floyd
- Python
- Terraform
- Vim
- Docker
- Cooking
- Chilli
- Command-line
- React
- Node
- Shell scripts
- Automation
- Decorators
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