/rinaldo-rex

My public record of who I am, what I have done, what I can do, and where I'm interested in!

Hi there 👋

Who am I, and what can I do for you?

Hi! I'm Rinaldo.

I develop applications for the web with a keen eye on usefulness and usability. (Fan of Psychology and Philosophy 🧘🏽)

Armed with the following skills and experiences, I'm able to build web applications that solve niche problems through technology. I'm currently exploring frontend landscape with React.

Just in case you need my resume, you can download it from here

Technologies I use for the web:

(Click to expand them to read more)

Backend (Python focused)

FastAPI/Flask and comfortable with most things on the block.

Been using Flask for more than 3 years now, and has built two ecommerce application, a completely from-the-scratch CRM for an edtech/fashion organization. Has also built a blog engine with it. Recently got an opportunity to work on FastAPI to build a micro-services architecture for an NLP-as-a-service engine, and loved its modern take on web application servers.

Celery, Redis

Have used celery for scheduling notifications, which made me search for better alternatives 😅 and ended up using RedisQueue, and TaskTiger, which gave me a fair experience with redis as high-performance minimal storage.

Frontend

HTML5/CSS3 Modern HTML5 has added some pretty sweet semantic tags that people often fail to use. I'm a fan of separation of concerns, because that enables debugging a lot more cleaner and both HTML5 and CSS3 does a fantastic job of enabling that. I love CSS3, with all the modern spec - Grid, Flex, and waiting for container queries. 😇 That will change the game. I am familiar with both Sass and PostCSS to enable cleaner and compatible CSS code across browsers, and versions.
JS > "What can be done in JS, will be done in JS"

I read this quote from a famous frontend dev, and in all honesty, this is true. ES6, and TS is enabling the modern web, and it will only evolve better in the coming years. * I'm just starting with JS,* and I'm really excited to build things for the web, and desktop.

ReactJS React really changed the game of frontend frameworks and thought process. React hooks, although does a lot of auto-magical stuff, enables a really scalable and quick development turn-around time. I'm currently working on react building an internal social network.
Figma Figma redefined the way we design for the web, and software. I love working with it so much so that I use it for more than just plain UI design. The infinite canvas is my holy grail of thought, mind-maps, designs, and thought palace. Been using Figma for more than a year and I love how beautifully they have crafted the usability of the application. It's my go-to case study for a SaaS application

Databases

Postgres/MySql My go-to database (apart from SQLite for test purposes) is Postgres. I believe PostgreSQL DB is the epitome of relational databases with an incredible performance, so much so that there are forks of it handling modern niche usecases (EdgeDB, TigerGraph) with a totally different paradigm. Although I have used MySql in the past, I rarely prefer it over Postgres.
MongoDB I have used MongoDB for write-intensive applications and built a CRM and a blog with that. I'd not prefer Mongo over Postgres in most cases, and especially when performance matters. Where there are equally, if not more edits on the data, I prefer Postgres.
Comfortable with graph/multi-model databases: ArangoDB, OngDB As part of a team building an NLP platform for chatbots, I have used Neo4j, and later moved onto OngDB (due to restrictions) and loved the paradigm shift from relational/non-relational DB into Graph DB. And then I encountered ArangoDB and absolutely loved its AQL, and multi-modal capabilities. Built an NLP-as-a-service engine with it as a solo developer, and I loved the developer experience with it. Would definitely try again.

Machine learning / AI

Frameworks
Tensorflow/Pytorch Have used both TensorFlow and Pytorch for both NLP and CV applications. Although liked the performance aspect of tensorflow, I appreciated the modern style of idiomatic code in PyTorch.
Domains
  • NLP

    Spacy/NLTK/AllenNLP/Snips A fan of Spacy since my college days and been using it since the early days when NLTK was the only go-to solution for NLP. AllenNLP with its modern datasets and models, is a boon for developers who love hacking all-things-NLP.
  • Compupter Vision

    OpenCV "The" computer vision library that shall prevail the end of our era - Although the developer experience isn't as optimal as in the domain of NLP (thanks, spacy!) the performance is alluring. Built a realtime multi-camera, Multi-person tracking system with plain OpenCV and achieved a really good performance.
DevOps/Deployment
Docker/Ansible Although my experience with DevOps is limited, I liked working with Docker and how much it enabled modern micro-services architecture to build high-throughput, high-traffic web applications. And even with negligible experience I loved using ansible. However, today I prefer Github Actions/ GitLab CI because of developer experience for CI/CD.

Tools/technologies/platforms

Git (Have used GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket) I strongly believe that Git enabled the world of software development to be truly asynchronous. And despite all the modern platforms, and GUI tools, I love using Git from command-line to remind myself of how powerful software can be.
IDEs (VSCode, Pycharm) I'd without skipping a beat vouch for modern developer tools and how much they play a role in our modern tech world. Been using Pycharm and VSCode for years, and I'm comfortable using the powerful features of them.
Misc
  • I write. A lot. From technical, non-fiction, to fiction, I can do it with utmost diligence.
    • Checkout my technical writing here and samples of my fiction over here on medium but my extensive research + personal exploration with non-technical writings can be found on my personal book at rinaldo-rex.github.io
  • I am good with pencil sketching (which aids in my designing of applications today!), and photography. Really

In addition to the above, I'm comfortable learning/adapting to modern technologies as long as they don't deviate massively in the domains.

Looking to hire?

I'm always open to any new and interesting opportunities, but some or all of the following will grab my priority.

Work/Life balance

With years of experience developing some of the complex applications for multiple startups, I have gathered skills technically so much so that I can hop onto any new technology pretty quickly without much hassle. But I'm currently looking to improve myself personally and I take work-life balance very seriously. I strongly believe that who I'm personally, reflects who I am professionally.

I go by the following principle to guide me to find the balance.

He who does not take breaks seriously, cannot take work seriously.

If you employ a 4-day work week, I'm more than certain that I can deliver better than a traditional week. This tops all the other priorities currently.

Fully remote positions

I have a good chunk of my professional experience working remotely for multiple startups (Yes, even before Covid) and I'm good at what I do asynchronously. I like to give my deep-work sessions as much time as possible, so I prefer fully remote positions to deliver some of my best contributions.

As someone who's very keen on writing, I'm good at communicating things lucidly in writing, and documenting things for other people within and outside the team.

I've managed multiple teams remotely and I find it cleaner to manage and mentor people remotely. And as such, I'm efficient working remotely and my current stance in life due to personal reasons makes me prefer remote work.

Opportunity to learn and explore

By learning opportunity, I do not mean subscriptions to Skillshare, Udemy, etc (Although I would like that), but the opportunity to learn different skills cross-team and cross-domain, the freedom to try and implement new things, and finally, the time and mental space to do so.

Most of my professional experience comes from a self-taught nature, and I'd absolutely love it when I'm provided the space for the same. And rest assured, I'm sure to bring in all these new knowledge, insights, and some of the best practices to those that I work with.

Current exploration

  • Exploring frontend as I'm fairly confident and comfortable with the backend. (Been doing that for most of my developer life). Using ReactJS - Architecting, building, and improving my UI/UX skills.
  • Apart from work, I'm diving deep into some schools of philosophies recently - Absurdism and Taoism are my top picks currently.

What people say about me

Some of my proud moments! 🥺

His perseverance and dedication at this young age will definitely make others jealous. He had single-handedly managed a couple of complex projects that require extreme competence of his effort every day for 8-10 months. He is a natural leader with an extra layer of empathy coated in his DNA. I wish he could lead an R&D team that will witness a greater amount of innovation in that space. He leads the life in a simple way, read-work-teach-celebrate.

- Nathan Kannan, managed me directly as VP of Operations

One of the most dedicated engineers I've worked with. The way he understands and describes any new tech is fascinating and the most required skill in this fast-paced environment.He doesn't ask you to do better, he will inspire you to do better. The way he interacts with Software has given me a new perception of Software design systems.

- Rajesh Shanmugam, Colleague and Mentee

His strengths solely rests on his planning and research abilities which helped us gain better sight of direction and exception handling which promoted development sprint cycles and quicker deliverables. Definitely an asset to the team and company.

- Raj Avinash Kumar, managed me directly as Customer success manager

One of the most disciplined people I've ever worked with. Technically, humble and always strives to attain mastery over the tool/technology at hand, which is a treasured quality in the industry. Thanks to his openness towards ideas and feedback, we've come up with many interesting solutions together.

- Kevin Isaac, managed me directly as CEO