Miguel Saraiva, Developer in Lisbon, Portugal
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Miguel Saraiva

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Engineer and Developer

Location
Lisbon, Portugal
Toptal Member Since
September 26, 2016

Miguel has twenty years and counting of programming and software architecture experience, from super fast multithreaded engines to ultra distributed crawling services, market research, online news gathering, and game development. He works with technologies including Assembly, (already forgotten) ALGOL 68, ZBuffers, the C family, and Azure.

Portfolio

Alteryx - Localization
C#, C++, JavaScript, TypeScript, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, Java, Datadog...
Planiter
Web Scraping, Web Crawlers, Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, Python, Scrapy, Node.js
Rockford Financial LLC
Transport Layer Security (TLS), Electron, Node.js

Experience

Availability

Full-time

Preferred Environment

Visual Studio, C++, C#

The most amazing...

...thing I've built is a system on Azure Cloud with dynamically distributed physics engine calculations over new nodes based on client entrance/exit.

Work Experience

Software Engineer

2021 - 2023
Alteryx - Localization
  • Found a major bug that had been around the product for several years, merging C++, C#, and external libraries.
  • Understood all aspects of the team I worked with, as well as all aspects of licensing—from clients to servers, applications, and end-user web portals.
  • Helped other peers in onboarding the team and projects.
Technologies: C#, C++, JavaScript, TypeScript, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, Java, Datadog, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), IntelliJ IDEA, SOAP, SoapUI, Jira, Confluence, .NET, CI/CD Pipelines

Developer

2016 - 2022
Planiter
  • Built a system from the ground up to crawl and scrape Australian sites, gathering information and making it available to customers using a map front end. Some information is downloaded in real time from open APIs to ease the users' work.
  • Integrated the work of developers from around the world into our own system.
  • Developed APIs for external clients to access our collected data from their own services and applications. Amazon EC2 machines are serving those APIs.
Technologies: Web Scraping, Web Crawlers, Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, Python, Scrapy, Node.js

Developer

2020 - 2020
Rockford Financial LLC
  • Developed a script for automating the buying process of Shopify and Demandware-based stores.
  • Adjusted the script to to mimic human behavior and overcome CAPTCHA-based protections.
  • Adjusted TLS security handshakes to overcome bot protections.
Technologies: Transport Layer Security (TLS), Electron, Node.js

Back-end Developer

2019 - 2020
SimplGrid
  • Developed an advanced backup solution from the ground up.
  • Implemented transparent backup to several media, including local, network, and cloud providers.
  • Implemented storage providers as interface objects, reducing dependencies on the whole project and making it possible to add newer storage paradigms.
Technologies: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

Chief Technology Officer

2010 - 2016
Vosdal Studios
  • Developed a distributed physics engine using Azure and C# for the back end. The relevance is that the MMO needs—using distributed computing—to cope with any number of simultaneous players, all in a single server farm.
  • Built frameworks for ease of working with online data storage, Facebook's Parse.com, Azure Storage, and SQL.
  • Created several algorithms to fuse vector and metadata information from OpenStreetMap with satellite altimetry maps to generate realistic terrain for in-game use.
  • Used the above developments in-house and on several desktop, Android, and iOS games using Unity3D mainly as the front end. The same services were utilized with XNA for Windows Phone.
Technologies: Protocol Buffers, Parse, XNA, OpenStreetMap, Unity, Azure, C++, C#, Unity3D, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server, Game Physics

Freelance Research and Development Consultant

2012 - 2014
GfK - Growth from Knowledge
  • Consulted on matters of audience research methodology.
  • Optimized database access and data generation processes with C#, T-SQL, and SQL database technologies.
  • Consulted for requirements gathering for new markets.
Technologies: SQL, C#, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server

Chief Technology Officer

2005 - 2010
Markdata
  • Architected and developed an online information gathering framework (web scraping) for internal news clipping processes using C#, Azure Compute and Storage, XPath parser, and SQL.
  • Architected and developed the multimedia data fusion engine framework and algorithm. Created it in C# for added modularity, expansion, and flexibility.
  • Architected a web service for an audience and planning engine for client and internal use.
  • Accepted clients' requests and designed the necessary architecture, deciding on the best tech stacks to help multi-disciplinary teams built to fit clients' expectations.
Technologies: Azure, XPath, HTML, SQL, C#, C++, .NET

Senior Software Developer

1996 - 2005
Markdata
  • Developed next-generation television audience analysis software using graphic UI, MFC, and OWL.
  • Built fast calculation engines for several clients and products. Used both internally and for some selected client apps. Made integrations using extended stored procedures for SQL server.
  • Bootstrapped most of the products's language and tech stack from C to C++.
Technologies: Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library, Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), C++, .NET

Senior Software Developer

1993 - 1995
Marktest
  • Designed and developed DOS-based solutions for television audience reporting.
  • Designed and developed Windows-based solutions for television audience reporting.
  • Spearheaded the use of C++ in the development team.
Technologies: Windows, OWL, C++, C

RIVERZ

A solution for the architecture of the physics simulations of “Rivers Under Roar,” a single shard, single instance, persistent massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, using a commercial cloud computing service. Presented in the Game Development Conference Videojogos2014, on the IPCA campus.

This was the back-end service for a multi-platform game working on desktop (macOS and Windows) and mobile machines (Android and iOS)

Languages

C++, XPath, C, C#, JavaScript, Python, T-SQL (Transact-SQL), BASIC, Pascal, CSS, HTML, TypeScript, OWL, SQL, Java

Frameworks

.NET, Unity, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Unity3D, Electron, Express.js, Scrapy

Libraries/APIs

Sockets, Google Maps, Node.js, Google Maps SDK, Xamarin.Android, Amazon Product Advertising API, Bing Maps API, OpenStreetMap API, LINQ, XNA, Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library, Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)

Tools

Microsoft Visual Studio, Fiddler, Blender, TFS, Subversion (SVN), CVS, Git, Visual Studio, Skype, Hyper-V, Bitbucket, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, IntelliJ IDEA, SoapUI, Jira, Confluence

Paradigms

Distributed Programming, Waterfall Development, Agile Software Development, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Concurrent Programming, Object-oriented Design (OOD), REST

Platforms

Windows, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Parse, MacOS, Linux, Amazon EC2

Storage

JSON, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Azure SQL Databases, Datadog

Other

Web Crawlers, Back-end, Architecture, Scalability, Multithreading, Game Development, Web Scraping, TCP/IP, Return Path Data, Xamarin.Forms, Shader Technologies, Unity Shaders, CI/CD Pipelines, Game Physics, OpenStreetMap, Transport Layer Security (TLS), Protocol Buffers, SOAP

1988 - 1993

Master's Degree in Computer Science

Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa - Lisbon, Portugal

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