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Hi, I'm

Omkarnath Phatak

Software engineer · Engineering leader

I’m a software engineer and engineering leader from Maharashtra, India. I build products, distributed systems, and teams. I enjoy working with Go and Python, and I still love to code.
Find me on GitHub

Omkarnath Phatak

Experience

VP of Engineering · Tijori Finance (September 2020 – Present)

I moved to Tijori Finance from Clustr, another Tally Software business, through an internal job posting, and took over as Head of Engineering.

  • Established engineering practices from scratch, including product specifications, low-level designs, Git workflows, and continuous integration and delivery.
  • Enabled an overnight shift to remote work without significant loss in productivity.
  • Restructured cloud infrastructure, reducing production server costs by 40%.
  • Defined engineering roles and hiring plans.
  • Built a foundation for refactoring the legacy codebase and delivered the refactor.
  • I still code, too.

Clustr · Senior Software Engineer II (June 2017 – August 2020)

  • Participated in defining the core data platform architecture
  • Designed and implemented a reference data platform with a REST API, polyglot persistence, and Dockerized deployment using Django, Redis, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and GraphQL.
  • Worked with company’s proprietary technology in C++ to deliver data ingestion components
  • Mentored three colleagues in Python and Django so they could contribute to the platform.
  • Interviewed candidates from junior developer to senior architect, and served on a campus hiring panel at IIT Madras.

Efficient Bazaar · AVP of Engineering (August 2016 – April 2017)

  • Set the project roadmap, priorities, technology stack, and service-oriented architecture to support the company’s technical vision as it scaled.
  • Built the hiring process and engineering workflows, then hired a team across PHP, Python, test automation, and manual testing.
  • Built the foundation codebase and set up cloud infrastructure, deployment workflows, coding practices, and development tools.
  • Coordinated with external agencies to launch the e-commerce portal and deliver an Android application.
  • Built a central user system as a foundation for single sign-on, an in-house e-wallet for purchases on credit, and server-side APIs for the Android app. Also completed major refactors and bug fixes.
  • Established the foundation for reporting services.
  • This diagram shows my technical vision for Efficient Bazaar. Artwork by Rohit Gehe.
    efficient bazaar tech vision

StriveWire GmbH · Full-stack Developer (October 2015 – April 2016)

  • Researched and implemented full-text search using PostgreSQL pg_trgm and React.
  • Implemented user-to-user chat in the React application, including real-time updates in the sidebar and site-wide messages menu.
  • Built the React tournament browser with filtering options.
  • Expanded unit, integration, and stress testing. Wrote a generator covering about 85% of GET routes and added Jade template syntax checks to deployment.
  • Laid the foundation for S3 uploads.
  • Refactored the codebase to improve reliability, support transactional queries, simplify nested asynchronous flows, and meet newly introduced coding standards.
  • Delivered additional features, fixes, refactors, and cleanup.
  • Contributed approximately 40,000 lines and removed 30,000 lines across the codebase.

MovieCycle GmbH · Go contractor

  • Maintained the B2C API and added product features.
  • Worked on web scraping, REST API updates, and Elasticsearch.
  • The product was JustWatch.

Coriolis Technologies · Member of Technical Staff (June 2011 – January 2014)

Django and Python

  • Colama (colama.net): an OpenStack and Moodle-like platform. I worked as a full-stack developer
  • Logbook: a centralized logging server with advanced filtering
  • Licensing portals for multiple products, supporting license key generation and online activation
  • An embedded configuration app for thin clients
  • A web-based configuration manager for a BYOD product
  • An administrative web app for a cashless canteen at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai

Information Security and Business Management

  • Built a new business vertical, hired staff, and trained a team of six
  • Completed five projects in one year, four for a leading global security company

Curious by nature

Early in my career at Coriolis Technologies, I took on a few technical challenges for fun:

  • Persistent RAM: Preserve part of RAM across a reboot without writing it to persistent storage. A colleague had done this on Solaris; I studied the approach and implemented it in the Linux kernel over two weekends.
  • SPICE for Android: I updated an open-source SPICE client to run on Aakash tablets developed by IIT Bombay, making it easier to access machines hosted on Colama.

Personal Projects

I’m a programmer at heart. Most of my projects are open source, and I contribute to other projects when I can.

  • Delve, the Go debugger

    I added support for multiple file and directory tables across compilation units, enabling Delve to work with CGO codebases.

  • Flyway database migration tool

    I added support for non-transactional SQL migrations in a patch that unblocked my then employer, JustWatch and enabled updates to PostgreSQL ENUM types.

GoSMS · Self-hosted SMS gateway

  • A self-hosted SMS gateway that runs on your own device
  • Built with Go
  • Featured on the Hacker News front page for two days. HN post
  • haxpax.github.io/gosms/

Shruti · Audio notification software suite

  • Listen to updates instead of reading them on screen.
  • A set of scrapers fetches updates, and microservices turn them into audio.
  • I built Shruti in 2015 to explore microservices, schedulers, and Docker containers. See the shruti-* repositories on GitHub for the source.
  • Golang, Ivona TTS, AngularJS, Docker
  • Shruti on GitHub

Quicktions · Quick answers to everyday questions

  • I tried building a startup around this app, but eventually called it off. Here’s a short demo:
  • Built with Go during the first Gophergala, a global Go hackathon. The demo shows what my collaborator Madhur and I made in 48 hours.

HNotepad · A notepad built with Haskell

  • I have a long-standing interest in functional programming, especially Haskell, and hope to return to it.
  • Even a simple notepad is fun to build in Haskell.
  • HNotepad
  • HNotepad running on a desktop

Online Communities

Microsoft MVP alumni

Online communities helped me learn to code. I graduated in commerce without formal computer science or programming education, and found mentors, knowledge, and opportunities through communities on the internet.

  • Chip India community
    • I joined the forums run by Chip magazine in 2005. Though the site has since closed, the community taught me how to learn from the internet and introduced me to lasting friendships.
  • Microsoft Developer Network

Goals

  • Professional
    • Build something useful that reaches people.
  • Personal
    • Make time to travel, experience how people live in different places, and learn to live thoughtfully with others.

Documents and Contact