Naitik Shah

An opportunity in application design, architecture and development allowing me to apply my knowledge and skills. Looking to work with highly motivated and skilled people in creating technology that consumers enjoy using.

• I want to work on a consumer technology project that is fun and I would feel passionate about — independent of the technologies used.
• My area of expertise is the web and the browser. I have experience building web applications at different scales using many variations of the LAMP stack. I have considerable JavaScript and front–end development experience. Standards, accessibility, performance, progressive enhancement, SEO and usability are intrinsic to my workflow.
• I enjoy using dynamic languages, and have professional experience with PHP, Python & Ruby. Any dynamic language — from Perl, Lisp to Lua, Erlang, Arc — is acceptable. I often experiment with languages and I enjoy learning new ones (and can do so quite fast).

• Currently employed at Facebook. I'm not looking for anything new.
• Worked at Yahoo! immediately after college and before Facebook. I was at Yahoo! from September 2005 thru March 2009.
  • Received Local and Market Place Exceptional Engineering Above and Beyond Award
  • Won Yahoo! HotJobs Hack Award
  • Nominated for the Yahoo! Super Star Award
• Syracuse University graduate with a degree in Computer Science.

• Technologies/Tools:
  • Heavy front–end experience: JavaScript, DOM, CSS, HTML, XML, XPath.
  • Heavy Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library experience. Also jQuery, Prototype experience.
  • Full LAMP stack: Setup production servers with fully customized Apache and MySQL, PostgreSQL, memcached configurations. Also setup lighttpd, nginx servers with FastCGI.
  • Heavy automation using zsh, bash, perl, ruby, python scripts.
  • Git, SVN, Perforce, CVS and hg.
• Operating Systems:
  • Linux — Over 8 years of experience. Distributions include Arch Linux, Debian / Ubuntu, RHEL.
  • FreeBSD — Over 3 years of experience.
  • Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows.
  • Virtualization for development and testing/QA environments.

• Experience with web application performance (client side technologies), security issues related to web development, accessibility, i18n, l10n, REST based web services.

• Two years of International Baccalaureate defined Java experience at United World College of S.E.A.
• Familiar with Qt (Trolltech/Nokia), GTK+ toolkits, .NET Development.
• Operating Systems Design. Included study and implementation of components required for multithreading and virtual memory subsystems.

• My experience at UWCSEA, an international school with over 50 nationalities, I believe gives me the added advantages of having diverse view points and the ability to adapt to new environments and work in teams with ease.
• I have been interested in computers, software and technology since I was a kid, and I’ve always had a lot of passion in creating new technology.
• I enjoy reading — and do so quite actively.

• Facebook Platform [March 2009–current]
  Part of the Platform team empowering the world's developers to make the Web more social for users. The Facebook Platform allows developers to build useful applications to enable users to express themselves to the world, or their social graph.
  • Facebook Connect: The tools to utilize the abilities of the Facebook Platform on any medium - including arbitary websites, mobile or desktop applications - or any device capable of being connected to the web.
  • Mu: A tiny Facebook Connect JavaScript library to demonstrate the capabilities of the Facebook Platform. It is an open source library hosted on GitHub.
  • StreamDiff: A demo Facebook Connect application that shows you an alternate view of your stream. It is an open source application hosted on GitHub.
  • The Run Around: A demo Facebook Connect application application with various backends including Python/Django, PHP and Python/Django/App Engine.
  • Worked directly with partners like Yahoo on their Facebook integration (front page).
• Yahoo! Inc, Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) [March 2008–March 2009]
  Part of the YAP team which falls under the Yahoo! Open Strategy (YOS) umbrella. YOS is a ecosystem that is designed to allow developers to build upon Yahoo! technologies and enhance the Yahoo! user's experience. The programmable aspects of YOS consisted of the Social and Web Services platform, which manages the data and provides APIs to access it, and the Application Platform that defined how developers can interact with Consumers where Yahoo! is the mediator.
  • OpenSocial: OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. At Yahoo! we implemented several parts of this API and used Apache Shindig for the rest of the functionality. Apache Shindig is an open source implementation of an OpenSocial container. OpenSocial is driven by the Google team that started the project, MySpace, Yahoo! and many others as an open source project. We were working directly with the Google team.
  • Caja: Worked on the JavaScript sandboxing technology used by Yahoo! Caja (pronounced "KA-ha") is "virtual iframes": it allows you to put untrusted third-party HTML and JavaScript inline in your page and still be secure. Caja is an Open Source Google project, and we were working directly with the Caja team at Google and also actively contributing code, bugs and involved in its progress.
  • OAuth: YOS uses OAuth for authentication.
  • postMessage: Implemented a postMessage fallback mechanism for older browsers using the location hash technique with chunking support.
  • Security: Implemented various security related parts of the Application Platform.
• Yahoo! Inc, HotJobs [2005–Feb 2008]
  Part of the HotJobs team where in the 2+ years I have been there we have made huge successful strides in all areas. Some of the projects I was leading/involved in:
  • Sonic Search: I was solely responsible for implementing an improved search results page. Some of the new features were: in–page pagination with browser history support, ajax handlers for actions that made sense (with CSRF protection), reduced load on the servers, reduced load on our search technology, SEO friendly URLs, full RSS support, huge real–world performance improvements, location and keyword auto complete.
  • Newspaper Co–Branding: A project I was involved in where we setup a generic self service system to support our increasing number of newspaper partners (200+ at current count). It was designed from the beginning to be deployed once and give Product Managers and Customer Service the ability to add new partners without requiring production pushes.
  • One Step Deployment: A project I was leading where the final result was the ability to deploy additional production machines ready to serve users with literally one command (plus about 20–30 minutes and hundreds of packages). This let us increase our capacity after our initial Newspaper launch to match load with the only wait being the hardware provisioning time. The system also deals with configuration, and so the same system is also used for new hires to setup their development environment with personalized configuration options in a matter of hours instead of days/weeks. Also used to setup virtual instances (using VMWare and FreeBSD jails) of our various sub applications used for development and QA.
  • Revision Control System Migration: A project I was involved in moving our code base from ClearCase to Perforce. As part of the migration I also wrote automated build scripts for several of our packages and migrated systems dependant on ClearCase.
  • Performance Lead: Through my time here I was the local performance lead and led several initiatives which gave significant real world performance improvements across the site.
  • Misc: Worked on adding features to old C/CGI code, migrated code from Solaris to BSD, worked on a XSLT/XML/PHP based recruiter system components, implemented tons of automation scripts for repeated tasks.
  • Hacks
    • OpenSearch: Developed a HotJobs specific OpenSearch plugin with Internet Explorer and Firefox compatibility.
    • Widgets: Wrote widgets for Apple Dashboard, Opera Browser, Yahoo! Widget Engine

(Concurrent with Education)

• Advised and implemented software/hardware upgrades at Uni–Design India [a jewelery company] to boost productivity. This included installing and configuring a base OS (Microsoft Windows 2003 Server), database server (Microsoft SQL Server) and related components. Later led to custom developed software for production management and tracking. [2003]
• Projects at Syracuse University
  • Network implementations at fraternities. Including wireless setups, ethernet, mailing lists.
  • Provided training, software installation, network installations and repairs.
  • Solicited business through cold calls and visits and accquantances.
• “Globe” Magazine's (the official Business magazine of UWCSEA) layout and graphics editor. Also designed the cover for the magazine for two consecutive years. [1999–2001]
• Dormitory technical and committee head at UWCSEA. [1999–2001]

• Syracuse University, BS in Computer Science from the L.C. Smith College, Syracuse, NY, USA [2002–2005]
• International Baccalaureate from United World College of South East Asia, Singapore [1999–2001]
• R. N. Shah, Mumbai, India