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Asad Jibran Ahmed, AWS DevOps Developer in Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Asad Jibran Ahmed

AWS DevOps Developer in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Member since January 8, 2018
For the past five years, Jibran has been building high performance, highly available, and scalable web apps in Django (Python). Before that, he was involved in a wide variety of projects, from Windows desktop applications in Visual Basic and C# to Perl-based web applications. Jibran joined Toptal because he's looking for world-class clients to work on interesting projects.
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Portfolio

  • Felix
    Django, Python, JavaScript
  • Agile Leaf
    Django, HTML5, Angular, Ionic, Cordova, Swift, Landing Pages, AdWords...
  • JRD Group
    Django, Python, HTML5, JavaScript, DevOps for VPS on Digital Ocean and AWS, PHP

Experience

Location

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

macOS, PyCharm, WebStorm

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on was a Windows desktop app calculating the chances of winning a game of Texas Hold'em, given starting conditions.

Employment

  • Head of Technology

    2018 - PRESENT
    Felix
    • Led the technical team and made technology decisions.
    • Managed the infrastructure as a DevOps engineer.
    • Provided hands-on coding on the main application and related services.
    • Took part in product discussions and the product development lifecycle.
    • Performed code reviews to ensure acceptable code quality standards were maintained.
    • Built and managed a pricing engine that translates rules from Excel sheets to Python and presented them as an API.
    Technologies: Django, Python, JavaScript

  • Technical Co-founder

    2016 - PRESENT
    Agile Leaf
    • Created and managed a number of landing pages and AdWords campaigns for a real estate agency based in the UAE.
    • Helped the team in the finalizing and shipping of a client's Android application that showcases their product line and helps their customers in the selection of a product appropriate for their use.
    • Led the overall technology strategy of the company and also mentored the team when they are trying to solve technical problems.
    • Created an Ionic/Cordova-based mobile app for a printing press. The app allows the sales agents to quickly generate quotes for printing jobs in the field.
    • Developed a Django-based property showcase site for a real estate agency in the UAE with an integration with a leading property CRM system.
    • Managed the server infrastructure for the projects that we work on. This includes services deployed in a multi-cloud environment and providers like Google Cloud, AWS, DigitalOcean, and WebFaction.
    • Ensured that the technology part of the business was handled in a way that makes sense for us.
    • Made certain, as product development team member, that the team works on products that provide the most impact for the business.
    • Assured that the product requirements are translated to technical specs that led to a fast product development.
    Technologies: Django, HTML5, Angular, Ionic, Cordova, Swift, Landing Pages, AdWords, Facebook Ads

  • Portals Technical Team Lead

    2014 - 2017
    JRD Group
    • Worked on the existing PHP codebase for one of the largest property-focused classified portals in the Middle East.
    • Led as the senior back-end developer in the project to rewrite the existing PHP codebase to Django/Python.
    • Handled the effort to internationalize and launch the new portal in more than five countries in the Middle East.
    • Was promoted to the position of team lead for the portals team (after the last team lead left)—focusing on the smooth operation of the technical team.
    • Managed the DevOps activities to ensure smooth functioning of the infrastructure that the JustProperty portal uses.
    Technologies: Django, Python, HTML5, JavaScript, DevOps for VPS on Digital Ocean and AWS, PHP

  • Junior Web Developer

    2013 - 2014
    Dubizzle
    • Developed the Django back-end and front-end of the new place-an-ad (PAA) form for the largest classifieds site in the Middle East.
    • Refactored the existing code to improve performance and clarity for the jobs vertical in the Dubizzle classifieds portal.
    • Helped on the monetization project for the Jobs vertical.
    • Improved the search functionality that was relevant to the jobs vertical.
    • Created the back end for the customer admin panel of the jobs vertical.
    Technologies: Django, Python, HTML5, Bootstrap

  • Contractor

    2010 - 2011
    Read.fm
    • Built a fully local web page based on a JavaScript system used by teachers to sync translated text to videos. These videos were used to help students learn foreign languages.
    Technologies: JavaScript

  • Contractor

    2010 - 2011
    Advantica Lab System Software
    • Improved a Django based web application by adding additional features. It was an app. related to optical prescription management and involved a good deal of mathematical calculations to produce accurate output.
    Technologies: Python, Django, JavaScript

  • Contractor

    2010 - 2011
    VentureMob
    • Built a scrapper in Python with BeautifulSoup to search and extract rankings from a popular restaurant ranking site.
    • Developed a couple of web pages on a Perl code base that showed users some entities on a Google Map and allowed them to search & filter.
    • Constructed an interactive web scrapper in Perl that would take some input, use that to run a search on a popular ranking site, and extracted the output.
    Technologies: Perl, Python, BeautifulSoup, Google Maps, JavaScript

Experience

  • 50mm | A Simple-to-use Image Gallery Web App in Go (Development)
    https://github.com/agile-leaf/50mm

    50mm is a photo gallery web application that I made when I couldn't find anything matching my requirements. I wanted something that would work without a database, use an S3 backed image storage, and use the Imgix real-time image processing service to optimize the images displayed.

    Not finding anything that fit the bill, I created 50mm in Golang. It uses the built-in HTTP server and Golang HTML templating. It integrates with S3 for the storage and uses Imgix for on-the-fly image processing.

    In addition to powering my own gallery of photos, it is now used by at least two other people that I know of to showcase their own image collections.

  • Daily Ayah Bot (Development)
    https://github.com/agile-leaf/daily-ayah-bot

    I wanted to experiment with the Twitter API and create a bot. I came up with the idea of one that would tweet out random verses from the Quran every day and programmed it in Go.

  • Dropletconn (Development)
    https://github.com/theonejb/dropletconn

    A Go-based CLI tool to list and quickly connect to DigitalOcean droplets without needing to configure keys and other SSH options on the host system.

    This utility allows me to quickly place SSH into the Digital Ocean droplets that I manage without explicitly having to configure them in my SSH config file. It is similar to how Google Cloud CLI allows using SSH in Google Cloud Compute instances.

  • Vue.js Medium Editor (Development)
    https://github.com/theonejb/vue-medium-editor

    I wanted to use a Medium-like editor on one of my projects that were using the Vue.js framework on the front end. Not finding anything that fit the bill at that time, I created my own by integrating the existing Medium Editor (GitHub.com/yabwe/medium-editor) into a Vue.js component.

  • Watchman | A Go Library to Listen to Changes in a Package and Its Dependencies (Other amazing things)
    https://github.com/theonejb/watchman

    When using the Go-based Gin web framework for a project, I missed the automatic reloading of Django whenever a dependency of the project changed.

    I created a small library called Watchman and integrated it into Gin to fix that.

  • Django Project Blueprints (Development)
    https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/django-project-blueprints

    In 2016, I published a book on Django titled Django Project Blueprints.

    This is a book for beginner Django developers that are looking to take their skills to the next level, and it teaches them advanced skills by showing them how to build seven mid-size projects, including an eCommerce site with a search functionality powered by Elasticsearch.

  • Banky App (Development)
    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.banky.banky

    A micro-lending app for Colombia. Built the backend in Django with Django Rest Framework for the APIs. The mobile application is build in Flutter.

  • N.B. Sons (Development)
    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.agileleaf.nbsons.app

    I built a Flutter-based mobile application to showcase the products of a veterinary medicine manufacturer. The back end is a WordPress site. I was provided with the APIs by the web developer.

Skills

  • Languages

    JavaScript, Go, Python, Python 3, CSS, Bash, PHP, HTML5, Clojure

  • Frameworks

    Django, Flask, Vanilla JS, Angular

  • Other

    Software Developer, AWS DevOps, Web App Deployment, Teams, Team Management, Django-oscar

  • Libraries/APIs

    Django ORM, Fabric, Vue.js, jQuery, React

  • Tools

    Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Terraform, Ansible, Systemd

  • Paradigms

    DevOps, Agile Software Development

  • Platforms

    Ubuntu, MacOS, Linux, AWS EC2, Docker

  • Storage

    Elasticsearch, Redis, Cloud Deployment, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, AWS RDS

Education

  • Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering
    2006 - 2010
    NFC Institute of Engineering and Fertilizer Research - Faisalabad, Pakistan

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