Ali Kherad

MateMachine is an online dating platform with the goal of putting different models of match making together. When I joined the team, they’ve been working on a monolithic MVP for two years which had crippling bugs and performance issues, after analyzing, I persuade them to gradually transition the software to a microservices architecture without the need for a big bang rewrite, this way we could add tests to the new parts which would assure lesser bugs throughout the development.

• Built an identity server to delegate all the work related to identity to an unified service and enabled OAuth features in the app.
• Led the team to extract simpler modules in the monolith to stand-alone services while keeping the same interfaces in the monolith.
• Mentored the team on testing practices.
• Built a sensible versioning for our packages (i.e. Docker, NuGet, Dart) to avoid dependency-hells.
• Designed a tool for our pipelines to expose markdowns located at the /docs in all projects on the Confluence and a dedicated documentation website which provided the related swagger endpoint for the APIs which helped the team a lot.

I worked as team lead on a complete & powerful SCM software to handle every aspect of industry-level supply chains. The stack consisted of ASP.net, Vue.js, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, SQS, Kinesis, CloudWatch with distributed microservices and microfrontends architectures.

• Taught the team, how to achieve segregation and more generally to follow principles such as SOLID, while maintaining performance.
• Implemented an integration testing framework to utilize Testcontainers and Respawn to allow for transient dependencies while remaining blazing fast.
• Designed a framework to allow task control mechanisms like cancellation or retrying on front-end and back-end and enable tracking them in the UI (like JetBrains IDEs).

When I got into Daroopin everything was at the MVP stage, so we’ve done a lot of re-designs and re-implementations to achieve a stable, maintainable codebase that our developers could easily work with.

• The first thing I did in the company, was to implement an application for pharmacy owners called “Shamim Pharmacy”. In the end, the application came out very well-designed so we wanted to have the same architecture for the main website.
• After that, I introduced the idea of having a unified identity server so we could both identify and track our users more easily.
• The most important thing was to re-implement the main website. We went for “Microservice application” and “Event-Sourced data” architectures.

I worked as a back-end developer on a game in Aratel, it was my first experience with games and in-game match-making but I really enjoyed it, I used some less-used technologies such as actors and distributed locks.

Other experiences in this project were:

• An in-house advertising system to advertise our other projects such as Daroopin.
• A multi-source payment system to buy multiple currencies such as Gems, Coins, Avatars.
• Graceful handling of user disconnection and failures in TCP keep-alive handshakes.
• User match-making by multiple criteria, such as user’s level, tier, win/lose rate.
• Multiple granularity locking. It wasn’t the first time I’ve implemented it, but the usage is so rare that I would be excited whenever I get a chance to use it.

The company was a subsidiary of TCI (Telecommunication Company of Iran). This experience showed me that I can be as productive in an obsolete and stale environment as in modern environments. Everything was done the old-fashioned way, but I tried my best to at least maintain a modern look for the API layer (which I was in charge of).

I worked on multiple projects in this company, which were:

• An API layer for Stored-Procedure-based functions in SqlServer. which exposed both HTTP and SOAP endpoints for each public Stored-Procedure determined in an admin panel. It took care of the authentication/authorization (both multi-level auth and role-based auth), caching (if requested by the admin panel), aggregation, and so on.
• An android application for buying internet packages, bill payment, and many more features.
• A dynamic reporting system for other applications in the company.

My second attempt to start a startup!

We designed a lot of applications in the company, and I had enough time to play with many libraries and different architectures. I developed a lot in means of technical knowledge and maintainable application.

When I was in college (bachelors), My colleagues and I worked on an AI automation system for employees and their cars in college. after a while, we decided to start our own company to sell our software. This was my first attempt to start a startup. Despite the fact that we were financially unsuccessful (and even eventually led to failure), the software was great.

• It was done in C# on windows.
• It was in Kiosk mode, so when you turned the PC on, our company’s logo would appear before loading directly into our software, so we even had the on/off (and more) buttons in the software.
• Because if the software should crash, nothing was there to help the user, I implemented a watchdog to handle the crashes (with multiple fallback options to make sure the bad configuration wouldn’t crash the software over and over again).
• The software was highly modular and everything came as a plugin, so the main application was just a window with basics, a canvas in the middle for plugins to render their content, and a great API layer for plugins to use.
• The message-bus (we were calling it the Signal Hub, taken from Qt) was amazing.
• The software would detect any type of license plate just by adding the right add-on for that kind of plaque.
• I implemented a structure for video input to support both analog input (using VLC) and IP/RTSP input (using EmguCV).
• We had a lot of physical components (which our hardware designer-made) that the software could communicate with.

I loved this software a lot, but it failed in the end.

The first company that I started to work as an intern. I did and learned a lot in this company.

• I was in charge of the network configurations (the company had a network guy, but I did all the stuff with his help)
• I also did a lot of photoshop retouching in the company which was the first thing I got paid for.
• I started to do front-end (I was around 15), first I only did HTML and CSS, but after about a year forward I started to learn JS as well. I designed a lot of websites and made a lot of themes for various CMSes.

One day I borrowed a book (it was about C++) from the company’s bookshelf, and it was my first step into the programming world.