Ravi Shankar

Programming Skills:

Languages: Rust, Python, Swift, HTML5, Vanilla JS (also Typescript), CSS, Bash.

Technologies: Unix (OS X, Ubuntu), Git, REST, Vue JS, Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Heroku, DigitalOcean.

Practices: Version controlled, Agile, Test-driven.

Experience:

Full-stack Developer

Omnijar Studio ( October, 2017 - Present )

Writing backend microservices in Swift for an open-source e-commerce platform.
Also writing frontend applications in Typescript and Vue for a client using the same platform.

Full-stack Developer

Surematics ( June - August, 2017 )

Contracted for a startup that develops applications for insurance brokers, which participated in the YCombinator summer (S-17) batch.
Wrote code for backend microservices in Rust, laid out the infrastrucure in Kubernetes, and helped with frontend development.

Backend Developer

Genome Life Sciences ( January, 2016 - January, 2018 )

Wrote utilities in Rust for bulk parallel processing of chromosome and DNA sequence data in FASTQ, SAM and VCF file formats.
Notable tools:
- A species finder which takes DNA sequence(s) and finds known species in O(1) time.
- A sequence aligner which uses Burrows-Wheeler transform and FM-index to backtrack and map DNA sequences to the human reference genome in O(n) time.

Open source contributions:

Servo

Contributor and reviewer for the Servo browser engine project (2015 - 2017).
I worked on the style system, python-based build system, and mentoring newcomers. Apart from helping folks in IRC and Github issues, I've authored more than 100 commits and reviewed more than 200 pull requests.
Implemented code for parsing and serialization of CSS grid shorthand and longhand properties.
Wrote handlers for highfive (a bot that responds to Github webhook payloads by welcoming newcomers, assign/tag issues and pull requests, post build failures, etc.) and a "mark and sweep" JSON cleaner for its tests.
Created a watcher that tests Servo builds in a dedicated machine, analyzes the logs, maintains a database of "rr" recordings of intermittent failures, and uses the Github API to file issues or comments to notify the people who work on such issues.
Wrote a compiler plugin for checking sorted order of declaration statements.

Other

Occassional contributor to the Rust programming language, its documentation and related tooling.
Mozillian since the summer of 2015.

Personal projects:

Highfive: ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾
A Github integration (bot) to provide a friendly welcoming environment for the contributors to open-source. It tracks issues and pull requests and performs actions such as assigning, labelling and commenting on issues and pull requests (using the Github API).
Beryllium: ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾
A high-performance bot SDK for Wire written in Rust. The entire SDK is built with the asynchronous features of Rust.
Nucleic acid: ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾
A Rust library to map short DNA sequence reads to the reference genome. It makes use of suffix array to generate the Burrows-Wheeler transform, from which an FM-index is built and used for finding exact matches in O(1) time.
Catalog: ⁽²⁰¹⁶⁾
A "file-backed" map written in Rust, for maintaining key/value pairs in a file, which uses binary search and file seeking to "get" the values in O(log-n) time.
Biographer: ⁽²⁰¹⁵⁾
A command-line based private diary written in Python, which allows users to write their everyday stories, view them, or search through them later. It makes use of a simple shifting cipher to encrypt/decrypt the contents. It also contains a Rust library, which uses FFI and parallelization to reduce the searching time by a factor of ≈100.
Free fall: ⁽²⁰¹⁵⁾
A terminal based 2D-ASCII game written in Rust, where the users try to save a jumper from hitting the cliffs. The game makes use of the terminal’s raw mode and interacts with the Unix C libraries for polling the keystroke inputs and prints thousands of characters frame by frame to indicate motion.

Miscellaneous:

Organizer for the Rust Chennai meetup.
RGSoC Coach (primarily for Rust/Servo).
Blogger since 2013 at wafflescrazypeanut.wordpress.com and now, at blog.waffles.space.
Contributor and reviewer of posts at Physics Stack Exchange for two years (2013-2015).
I also play with code and make some cool stuff in my free time:
- An ASCII Art Generator for JPEG/PNG images which extracts the necessary details for generating the ASCII sketch.
- A CSS injector that slowly injects a stylesheet into a style element in the DOM and gets rendered in realtime.
- A responsive website for our college symposium (2016) without the use of any external libraries.