Resume - Dev Purkayastha

Freelance Web Developer (2/09 - Current)
Client projects have included:
- web-based social games with rich interfaces
- REST-based backends for iPhone applications
- systems for scraping and storing of data
- automated deployment of dynamically created Amazon EC2 instances
- refactoring and replacement of legacy Rails code

Bold Lantern, Founder (6/12 - Current)
Designing and prototyping a mobile/social game for fitness.
- Built a rich front-end in Backbone.js that displays player data while talking to a RESTful API.

Eleven Learning, Director of Technology (2/09 - 4/12)
Cofounded Eleven Learning (http://www.elevenlearning.com), an educational publishing startup with a mission of delivering better online textbooks and a better online reading experience. Eleven Learning was part of the Imagine K12 startup incubator in the summer of 2011.
- Developed a web-based textbook reader with annotation, highlighting features and social commenting.
- Launched a social peer-review community, built upon the reader software.

Auburn Quad, Web Developer (7/08 - 2/09)
Developed software for online political fundraising. The primary client was ActBlue (http://www.actblue.com); through the 2008 election cycle, ActBlue raised over $40 million in grassroots contributions. I joined to bolster development in preparation for the 2008 election.
- Developed an asynchronous cache layer for contribution summaries, removing one of the largest performance bottlenecks.
- Revamped the candidate directory for better faceted search via Solr.
- Led the transition to automated deployment via Capistrano. This required custom deployment recipes due to the app's architecture and security policies.

Sugarloot, Director of Technology (9/06 - 7/08)
Led the development and launch of Sugarloot, a social networking site centered around contests and user-generated content. We operated as a subsidiary of a larger entity, but with the autonomy and aggressive pace of a startup.
- Designed a responsive and scalable web backend through proper database design, memcache-based data caching, and reverse-proxy image caching.
- Recruited the feature development team and implemented better development practices.

Sconex, Web Developer (2/06 - 9/06)
Developed for Sconex, a social networking startup focused on high-school students. The site was booming in popularity, and needed more developers for feature development and scaling work. Sconex was acquired by Alloy Media and Marketing; members of the team would form the core of Sugarloot.

BzzAgent, Web Developer (9/04 - 2/06)
BzzAgent is a word-of-mouth marketing firm. Its webapp was vital for communication between the business and its membership.

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