Akshay's slice of the web

  • Professional experience (last update: Dec 2021)
    • 7 Monthstill August 2021

      Datadog

      Datadog is a top cloud monitoring and security platform, I held the role of Software Engineer II.

      Member of Security Monitoring team. Authored RFC, developed platform interface, and API to streamline log attribute enrichment with security information like threat-intel and geo-IP. Optimised high load service by removing mongo dependency. Tech — Java, Python, Kubernetes, Kafka

    • ~2 Yearstill July 2020

      Shuttl

      Shuttl is India's largest office commute provider, I held roles of software-engineer and senior software engineer. Member of the Platform team. Built core backend services and APIs such as bookings, trips, reservations, ETA, and occupancy. Tech — Python, Flask, AWS, Docker, Micro-services, DDD, React

      • Part of the team that re-wrote the monolith backend into modern service-oriented architecture from scratch. Applied domain-driven design, to make software that is "soft" - easy to change and speaks the business language. This greatly improved our engineering agility and robustness
      • Owned ETA and tracking development which is a critical part of our product experience. With collaboration among Tech, Product, and Analytics we pushed on-time Shuttl's from ~60% to 90% Simultaneously cutting the absurd cost of Google's direction API.
        I wrote about this journey, check out my retrospective.
      • I was also in a 2-person code quality squad, responsible for reviewing all pull requests - ensuring quality, developing patterns for common problems in a rapidly growing codebase and team.
      • Mentoring backend engineers in paired feature development and training sessions. Here's a writeup on instrumentation
    • 1 yeartill Jun 2018

      Product Engineer at Kayako

      Fullstack Product development experience in a B2B SaaS startup (pre-acquisition). Working among talented engineers that pack a punch, making an awesome product even more awesome 📈

      • Developed and shipped features, improvements, and also, patches for some very elusive bugs. I've worked across the stack involving: Product API, few backend Micro-services (Python/Elixir), and sophisticated frontend applications (Vue/Ember)
      • Implemented performance improvements in few backend APIs with Redis, HTTP caching, and content tweaks. Also improving Messenger widget boot time by ~80% on slower networks.
      • Distributed workload among email-service instances with consistent hashing, used consul for service discovery.
      • Added support for messenger customization with runtime configuration supporting styles, texts, business-hours.
    • Jun - Aug2016

      Kayako internship

      An amazing summer internship at Kayako. Worked on developer.kayako.com's content and search. Read my post!

      • Optimized content generation using Jekyll, improved developer productivity in updating portal.
      • Improved CI build time
      • Integrated Algolia search across the site. Generated search indexes on the backend with Ruby, then made a search widget on the frontend.
  • Side projects, tinkering and misc.
    • July2020

      TeleType

      Think google-meet but for developers - A realtime collaboration tool with terminal-sharing, voice, notes, code-sharing, whiteboard, and more. It's end-to-end encrypted, built to be privacy focussed and extensible.
      This is a re-write of my older project "oorja". There's a lot I've learnt since university days, this time it has a solid architecture and design that I can be confident with. It's powered by Elixir backend, React-Typescript frontend.

    • Sipping Elixirsince 2018

      I've been playing around with Elixir, learning functional programming. It's a fascinating technology with an awesome community. Here are some of my experiments:

      • Redex: A naive redis-server implemented in elixir - TCP server, streaming RESP parser, few commands like get, set, setx. All done with TDD. ~Jan 2019
      • I've also completed a few Hack-Attic challenges.
        Side-note: This style of programming challenges is awesome, I always learn something new.
      • A microservice used in oorja for realtime messaging between room participants and relaying important events that happen at the backend. ~March 2018
    • Nov2017

      Email-Trail

      A python package to analyse hops taken by an email to reach you. Gives structured information about each hop - Hostname, Protocol used, Timestamp, and Delay. Github
      Also made a small Webapp for ease of use (hosted on free heroku, may take a few seconds to spin up). Github for webapp

      TDD proved amazing for this python module. It forces you to think how to structure your code and gives confidence when refactoring.

    • In Dev2017

      oorja - [alpha version]

      Final year of university, I wanted to develop a polished application end to end. It's still in alpha though, that last 10% of product development takes exponential effort compared to the first 90%.
      About oorja:
      Effortless video-voice chat application with realtime collaborative features. Extensible using react components 🙌. The apps are react components which utilize a simple but powerful mini-api (using props and some event listeners) to add more capabilities to the room on demand

    • 20132017

      Computer Engineer

      Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Engineering from Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology ❤️

    • November 2016

      Open Source Software World Challenge 2016

      OSSWC Certificate of achievement for contribution to development of open source software. (hogwatch)

    • April2016

      Hogwatch

      Per process bandwidth monitor. A python package utilizing nethogs cli tool for data and providing a web based GUI. I made it for my college assignment, it ended up on [HackerNews].
      GitHub - warning: old, abandoned code

    • _2016

      Completed one year of Hackathons

      Participated in many Hackathons and won some too :D
      Met awesome people and experimented with interesting technologies.

      spoils of war 😎

    • _2015

      Biddu

      A realtime auction site with IBM Watson as voice assistant made for IBM bluemix hackathon. Won an iPhone 6 🙃
      GitHub - functioning prototype

    • _ 2015

      Selfie Fun

      A cordova based iPhone app to analyze faces in selfies. Uses alchemy vision api.