Jamil Alvi

Full-Stack Software Developer, Startup Founder, Educator..

Hello.

That's me

I build & connect systems with web technology. I have experience in the full life-cycle of Software Development; everything from customer development & support to QA, product documentation, software engineering, system architecture, software development leadership, team management & product management.

My most recent work has been building web applications with Python backends.

Right now, I'm taking a break to work on some creative projects.

I have just completed work on a large, multi-year, division-wide CMS and publishing system for a global technology company. In my role as system architect and lead engineer, I led a team to design and build a set of applications and micro-services for a custom CMS using technologies such as: Python, MySQL, NSQ, Manticore & AWS.

I teach others how to solve problems & make stuff with technology too. I like to geek out & also think like a business person. I think managing teams to accomplish a shared goal is fun. I have lead teams that create both commercial software products and internal IT products.

My company, QuarkSpring, does software consulting & builds and hosts e-commerce web apps. Our first web app is called Coaches Flow — an online subscription service that is e-commerce and collaboration for business, health & life coaches. This is a big vision, so the first version is focused simply around tools to make & manage client appointments. It will be available soon.

Also in development is an app called WorkNote — a way to store and track your work and documents using a simple note taking model.

Recently, I have held positions of Senior Engineer and Engineering Manager at Emma and at Campaign Monitor.

I was previously on the faculty of an amazing coding bootcamp called PDX Code Guild where we helped people retrain themselves as full-stack web developers.

I've assited with mentoring at Code Day this year in Portland. It's a great experience and environment for kids to learn coding by hacking on a project for a weekend.

I was able be a mentor at a Django Girls event where over the course of a day, showed students (many of whom had never made a website before) how to create an application in Django and host it on the web. A great community and they have an excellent Django Tutorial

I had the honor of volunteering with an organization called Teals to teach AP Computer Science to high school students in Portland, OR. high schools. It was a great learning experience.

I'm once again volunteering with Hack Oregon on an open source project to create a platform and framework for making public information about the City of Portland more available for data analysis and geospatial visualization. This project (PlotPDX) is definitely a work in progress (but will be totally cool when completed).

I love to help others & I'd love to work with you. Unfortunately, I'm not available for new contract work at the moment, but I'm happy to connect on LinkedIn to discuss possible projects. I am based out of the beautiful Pacific Northwest in Portland, Oregon.

I'm always learning new things and trying to improve my skills. Here are some new things I'm currently learning or playing with:

  • Getting into some creative coding with Processing. Lots of great tutorials for this all over the Net. Time to brush up on my high-school trignometry.
  • Vue.js is a really cool, lightweight, front-end JavaScript view-model framework. I like things that are simple, lightweight and flexible. It does one thing well and doesn't force you into writing your entire app it's way (I'm looking at you AngularJS).
  • Love2d is a powerful, compact, game framework for Lua. I like that the framework is low-level, has a clean set of dependencies and it's really easy to package & distribute games with wide platform support (Win, OSX, Linux, iOS, Android). I didn't like Lua as a language at first, but it's flexible combination of JavaScript and Python language features is growing on me.
  • Leaflet is an amazing little JavaScript library for displaying web maps with a thriving ecosystem of extensions that allow you to build some pretty sophisticated mapping apps in the browser.
  • I'm doing more with GIS now and I'm really liking the latest release of QGIS. Stable, performant and open source. What more could you ask?
  • I'm doing more with NodeJS with Hapi JS to use JavaScript on the server to build webapps.
  • I host my work on WebFaction because they understand Python and excellent good customer service. I recommend them when asked about hosting companies.