rabialam

SEEKING WORK:

I've got past full-stack experience in Django. My most recent experience was being cofounder in a bootstrapped startup where I put together the entire platform (including frontend, consumable API backend, and browser extension) from scratch. I'm strongest doing backend work in Python (especially for Django) -- anything from message passing middleware to RESTful API services to test suites to data modeling to data ingestion and sanitization. However, I can handle frontend if needed as well, and can design a page that looks pretty (though I would not consider myself a full designer or information architect).

SKILLS:

Backend: Python, Django, South, PostgreSQL, Couchbase, Celery, TastyPie, django-unittest

Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript/CoffeeScript using jQuery, bootstrap, underscore.js

Deployment: Fabric, Boto, nginx, AWS, EC2, ELB, EBS

Design: Illustrator, Bootstrap, CSS, HTML

Email: statokinetics at gmail dot com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rabialam

Very interesting take, especially at the end in enumerating privileges. I had a similar experience with my own Mom's Macintosh SE being the gateway to my life in tech, and I don't know what I would done if she didn't introduce me to that at such a young age. I have been so lucky. Born in the States (even though mom's a foreigner which was a blessing in a lot of ways on account of the work ethic she tried to bestow upon me), college educated male with tech skills that were developed sort of circumstantially but very intensely at a very early age -- I feel so lucky, as if I "had a winning lottery ticket" for sure. And now, even as I am finally able to enjoy the the excitement and passion of a career that is exactly what I want to be doing -- I find myself so often feeling so incredibly anxious about why I am not doing more to help others gain access to my world. Frankly, I think that it's rare that (and sad that it's rare that) we have open discussions in the tech community about that word "privilege" where there isn't an INTENSE amount of denial, apathy, minimization, skepticism and disbelief (which, sadly, are some of the most common results of such privilege). For me, this post was a breath of fresh air that adequately expressed a lot of what I feel everyday -- I feel so lucky, but I feel so torn. Yes, I think I worked really hard to make good on my skills and develop them. No, I do not think that makes the world even remotely fair. Yes, I still feel like it is so unfair that in a lot of respects it is almost CERTAINLY a lottery. Yes, it continues to bother me that I feel sort of powerless about that divide, but yes, I would like to bridge that. Perhaps part of that is to start blogging as you have. I think that's what I like so much about this post: you are really leading by example in a way that is rare and yet quite needed. Good on you, and I look forward to reading more.

Awesome! Such a pain point that needs an actual solution -- I'm honestly pretty underwhelmed with GitHub for not providing this kind of functionality in the first place. Glad someone took the initiative to do something not just cool, but so very necessary with the GitHub API.

Agreed. This is the first major outage I've noticed as a user of github in several years. I have my grievances with GitHub, but the pull requests, issues and organization systems are really useful for me to have in a team setting, so I couldn't really see myself moving to another code management solution -- what would my alternatives be? JIRA? Lighthouse? And that doesn't even touch on the social aspect -- nothing is quite like github in terms of community vibrancy and activity. I've found so much useful information and documentation scattered through issues and forks that are all through github that I couldn't imagine finding otherwise -- or at least, it would be more difficult to find elsewhere. I really like being able to associate commits to issues via commit message. Still, this kind of outage definitely makes me thinking about having a some kind of a mirror long term -- haven't been able to use my issues all day, and that's kind of frustrating.

I really like the app -- just tried it out on a project and was able to very easily create a custom icon and use it at multiple sizes via the app.

Great list. In particular, fuzzywuzzy and pattern caught my eye in a "how-have-I-not-heard-of-these" kind of way.