Thanga Senthil Rajan Vivakaran, Developer in Lower Hutt, Wellington, New Zealand
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Thanga Senthil Rajan Vivakaran

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Full-stack Developer

Lower Hutt, Wellington, New Zealand

Toptal member since October 19, 2021

Expertise
PHPJavaScriptjQuerySilverStripeGitHubAgile DevelopmentMySQLPostgreSQLREST APIMoodleCSSNode.jsWordPress Development
Bio

Raj is a full-stack developer and team leader with over ten years of experience in PHP, JavaScript (jQuery and Angular), SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL), HTML, and CSS. He has extensive experience building web applications using several PHP frameworks and content management systems, including SilverStripe, Drupal, and WordPress. Raj upgrades his skills constantly by quickly learning and embracing new technologies.

Portfolio

Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, Wellington
PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, jQuery, Angular, SilverStripe, C#, Node.js, React...
Learning Media Ltd (Previously CWA New Media)
PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, eZ Publish, Drupal, WordPress, MySQL, PostgreSQL...

Experience

  • PHP - 10 years
  • JavaScript - 10 years
  • HTML - 10 years
  • Content Management Systems (CMS) - 10 years
  • SilverStripe - 8 years
  • CSS - 7 years
  • MySQL - 6 years
  • Angular - 4 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Windows, Linux, Azure

The most amazing...

...solutions I've architected and developed using Azure Active directory include single sign-on for the Open Polytechnic website, Moodle (LMS), and Mahara.

Work Experience

Senior Full-stack Programmer

2013 - PRESENT
Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, Wellington
  • Provided technical solutions and played a crucial role in upgrading integration points for Open Polytechnic applications when we moved to the new student management system.
  • Improved security and performance by approximately 15% by upgrading the Open Polytechnic website infrastructure from Silverstripe 2 (PHP 5+) to Silverstripe 3 (PHP 7).
  • Provided ideas and developed an application that allowed students to track their applications' progress after submitting them online. This reduced the number of application-related calls received by approximately 50%.
  • Tracked and supported multiple Open Polytechnic applications, including Mahara, Moodle, and DSpace, using Zendesk and ServiceNow.
Technologies: PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, jQuery, Angular, SilverStripe, C#, Node.js, React, GitHub, Azure, Content Management Systems (CMS), WordPress, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP 5, Bitbucket, PHP 7, REST APIs, eCommerce

Team Lead | Senior Programmer

2008 - 2013
Learning Media Ltd (Previously CWA New Media)
  • Led a team of five to upgrade and deploy 50+ websites to the new version of eZ Publish with minimal downtime and little to no impact on users.
  • Built an eZ Publish plugin using jQuery, allowing users to easily create interactive image maps and animations.
  • Earned a promotion to become the team leader for the technical team of 10+ members, including testers, designers, developers, and system administrators.
Technologies: PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, eZ Publish, Drupal, WordPress, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP 5, REST APIs

Experience

Open Polytechnic Website

https://www.openpolytechnic.ac.nz/
The Open Polytechnic website was built on the Silverstripe CMS. As a full-stack developer for 5+ years, I played a crucial role in bringing the website from a legacy design to a new, responsive design. I also developed multiple plugins that helped the content manager create engaging and interactive content for a better user experience. I improved the performance and security by migrating the website to better infrastructure in Azure Cloud services.

Image Map Add-on for eZ Publish

An eZ Publish add-on that allowed CMS users to use the web interface to create image maps with multiple animations without knowledge of HTML. I developed the add-on using jQuery to build the UI, making it very simple for users to create an image map and assign actions to the image map, such as opening a video, moving an element, and submitting the form.

Integration of WordPress Site with aXcelerate Student Management System (SMS)

https://github.com/vtsr60/torro-forms-axcelerate
I built a WordPress plugin to integrate the Wentworthville Tamil Study Centre (www.wtsc.org.au) application with their aXcelerate SMS to create new and updated existing contacts. The vtsr60/torro-forms-axcelerate plugin extends the functionality of the Torro form, an open-source WordPress form builder.

OpenPolytechnic Moodle (Legacy LMS)

OpenPolytechnic, the lead distance learning provider, used Moodle as their LMS until 2018. I have supported their Moodle instance from 2015 to 2018 and implemented multiple integrations (ADFS SSO and student management integration). I also worked on a project to migrate from Moodle to OpenPolytechnic's new LMS (iQualify) and decommission their Moodle instance.

Technical Support to Implement SSO

Provided technical support and recommendation on technology to use to enable Single Sign-On (SSO) using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS)/Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) on web and mobile applications.

Also, we performed peer programming to set up SimpleSAMLphp and implemented the SSO login process using Azure AD.

Education

2003 - 2006

Master's Degree (MCompSci) in Computer Science

Victoria University of Wellington - Wellington, New Zealand

1998 - 2002

Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Computer Science

Madras University - Chennai, India

Skills

Libraries/APIs

jQuery, REST APIs, Node.js, React, jQuery UI, SimpleSAMLphp

Tools

GitHub, Moodle, Bitbucket, Git, ADFS

Languages

PHP, JavaScript, PHP 5, HTML, CSS, C#, PHP 7

Frameworks

SilverStripe, Angular

Paradigms

Agile Software Development

Storage

MySQL, PostgreSQL

Platforms

Azure, Drupal, WordPress, Windows, Linux, cPanel

Other

Content Management Systems (CMS), eZ Publish, Single Sign-on (SSO), eCommerce

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