Sumeet Agarwal, Developer in San Francisco, CA, United States
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Sumeet Agarwal

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

San Francisco, CA, United States

Toptal member since September 6, 2019

Expertise
LinuxPythonMySQLJavaScriptRubyRuby on RailsAgile DevelopmentPostgreSQLGolangRustDjangoCSSNoSQLRedisOCamlHaskell
Bio

Sumeet has over a decade of experience, including long-term stints at Yelp.com and Remind.com, leading large cross-team projects. He does superbly clean engineering work and is an organized project planner. He excels at communication with both technical and non-technical colleagues, leveling up fellow engineers, and making sense out of the computer jargon.

Portfolio

Self-employed
PostgreSQL, Django, Go, Python, Rust
Programming Language Research
Rust, JavaScript, Graphical User Interface (GUI), Creativity...
Remind
GraphQL, Redis, Amazon DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, React, Node.js, Ruby, Go

Experience

  • HTML - 20 years
  • Linux - 20 years
  • Python - 15 years
  • Testing - 10 years
  • Agile - 8 years
  • Ruby - 8 years
  • Go - 4 years
  • Rust - 2 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Linux

The most amazing...

...thing I'm currently doing is designing a new kind of graphics-based programming environment that's easier to use for both programmers and non-programmers.

Work Experience

Freelancer

2018 - PRESENT
Self-employed
  • Maintained web app and high-volume web scraping pipeline and launched new products as a 1-person engineering team for a property management startup that was later acquired. Worked as a full-stack DevOps using Go, Python, Django, TensorFlow, and DigitalOcean.
  • Rescued gardening calendar Kickstarter, which had deadly performance issues one week from launch, and helped onboard the first few months of customers. Used Ruby on Rails and Stimulus.
  • Guided and cleaned up the software stack of a successful startup with "freelancer syndrome." Shortened time to add new features by 3/4 by adding integration testing infrastructure, all while adding new features using Go and Node.js.
Technologies: PostgreSQL, Django, Go, Python, Rust

Inventor

2019 - 2021
Programming Language Research
  • Built a prototype for the (possibly) world's first functional graphical structured code editor and used it to solve the majority of 2020's Advent of Code coding challenges.
  • Utilized WebAssembly to get the prototype working both on the desktop and the browser.
  • Learned Rust to a near-expert level and became proficient in Haskell and OCaml.
Technologies: Rust, JavaScript, Graphical User Interface (GUI), Creativity, WebAssembly (Wasm), Functional Programming, Haskell, OCaml, Design Language

Product and Infrastructure Engineer

2015 - 2018
Remind
  • Built a one-way messaging and two-way chat system connecting over 30 million teachers and students, with users in almost every school in the US.
  • Designed and implemented many large-scale infrastructure changes to support the growing user-base and engineering organization, e.g., migrating from PostgreSQL to DynamoDB and introducing GraphQL.
  • Led the development of Remind for Schools program, which gave bulk controls and reporting to school administrators.
  • Kept the infrastructure running healthily at all hours of the day, by setting up monitoring graphs and alerts.
  • Made major organization-wide improvements to the developer testing, continuous integration, and error reporting pipelines.
Technologies: GraphQL, Redis, Amazon DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, React, Node.js, Ruby, Go

Senior Product Engineer

2015 - 2015
SocialChorus
  • Maintained a web-based employee outreach SaaS used by very large companies, like Coca-Cola and Target.
  • Performed a seamless data migration off of a niche and hard-to-use datastore called CouchDB onto the standard PostgreSQL.
  • Worked in a full-time pair programming environment.
  • Implemented and maintained front-end and back-end features using Ruby on Rails and Backbone.js.
Technologies: Extreme Programming, XP, Test-driven Development (TDD), Backbone.js, Ruby on Rails (RoR)

Software Lead

2010 - 2014
Yelp
  • Led the development of Yelp’s consumer line of products, including Yelp deals, gift certificates, and food delivery.
  • Coordinated large team projects.
  • Pioneered more efficient and code organization methods for the 200-person engineering team.
  • Improved the performance of the in-house email delivery pipeline.
Technologies: MySQL, Microservices, Python

Corporate IT, Internal Tools

2009 - 2010
Sogeti USA
  • Rebuilt the company website, which had previously been built in Microsoft Frontpage and was maintained by a single developer, into a CMS which the marketing department could update themselves.
  • Implemented a web-based single site authentication system that worked on top of Active Directory.
  • Administered Linux and Solaris servers.
  • Built internal tools like wikis and blogs so that different branches could share information with each other.
  • Developed an internal employee catalog which synchronized data between Microsoft Exchange and Oracle E-Business Suite.
Technologies: Content Management Systems (CMS), Django, WordPress, PHP, Python, Oracle, Linux

Experience

Yelp Food Delivery

https://www.yelp.com/nearme/delivery
I led the development team that built the first two iterations of the Yelp food delivery platform, connecting Yelp users to food delivery platforms such as Delivery.com and Eat24. It involved Python back-end development, payment processing, partner APIs, and project planning.

Reminder Messages for Teachers and Schools

https://www.remind.com/
I built and maintained most of the company's product features, including one- and two-way messaging between teachers, students, and parents, controls, and bulk reporting for school principals and administrators. I also implemented large-scale back-end optimizations to support the 30 million users.

CodeMaestro

https://youtu.be/E9pLT0oQQCI?t=102
I'm working on a prototype for a revolutionary graphics-based programming environment and language that I hope can make programming at least 10x more productive, both for beginners and pros.

Check out the link for a super work-in-progress glimpse at the project.

Education

2004 - 2008

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

Boston University - Boston, MA, USA

Skills

Libraries/APIs

SQLAlchemy, Backbone.js, Node.js, React

Tools

Vim Text Editor, Shell

Languages

Python, HTML, Rust, Go, Ruby, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, GraphQL, Haskell, OCaml, Swift, Java

Frameworks

Ruby on Rails (RoR), Django

Paradigms

Agile, Test-driven Development (TDD), Testing, Microservices, XP, Extreme Programming, Functional Programming

Platforms

Linux, Oracle, WordPress, iOS

Storage

PostgreSQL, MySQL, NoSQL, Redis, Amazon DynamoDB

Other

Project Planning, Content Management Systems (CMS), Programming Languages, Integrated Development Environments (IDE), Graphical User Interface (GUI), Creativity, WebAssembly (Wasm), Design Language

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