Vik Ramanujam

Vik Ramanujam's Avatar

Technical full-stack Lead, Barcelona

I like building things.


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.


Talks and Slides


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.

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.


Likes

  • Functional Programming
  • Vertical rhythm
  • CI
  • Pink Floyd
  • Python
  • Terraform
  • Vim
  • Docker
  • Cooking
  • Chilli
  • Command-line
  • React
  • Node
  • Shell scripts
  • Automation
  • Decorators

This page uses no Javascript and is hand-coded using CSS Variables, Markdown, , node & a whole lotta love.

Completely open sourced for the world on Github. No copyright whatsoever - steal!