Hi! 👋

I'm Tamizhvendan. A Well-rounded Pragmatic, Passionate, Polyglot & Product Engineer and Software Craftsman from Chennai, India 🇮🇳.

I started my programming journey at the age of 12, and the passion has not left me since then. I am working in the IT industry since 2009.

I have a wealth of experience in solving complex problems using different technologies and developing custom software solutions.

I have worked with more than 15 clients and developed 20+ software products using 11 different programming languages. Clojure, Haskell, and F# are some of my favorites.

I am a functional programming evangelist, authored couple of books on Web development in F# and an active open-source creator.

Currently, I work as a Senior Technical Architect in Chargebee and founder of Learn CS in Tamil and Kalvify.

You can stay in touch with me on Linkedin and Twitter.

My Professional Career

I started my software engineer career in Cognizant, India, in November 2009. During my two years and four months of tenure here, I was part of a research & development team and built tools and frameworks that aid automation testing. The tech stack is predominantly from the DotNet ecosystem, and C# is the primary language.

In my quest to learn SAAS, I joined ABCO Advisory Services, India, a leading health services product company. In my four years and six months there, I built and maintained an analytical platform designed to help health organizations monitor practice performance across different segments. I was involved in the end-to-end lifecycle of this SAAS product.

After working with DotNet technologies for nearly seven years, I have decided to move out of my comfort zone and work with other languages and their ecosystems.

For the next five years and eight months, I worked with Ajira, a premium software services and consulting firm in Chennai, India. As a principal software engineer, I collaborate with enterprises, startups, and entrepreneurs and engineer their ideas into excellent products. I take care of end-to-end ownership from inception to production deployment and maintenance.

In a typical project at Ajira, I work with the client to understand their requirements, then collaborate with them on prioritizing the deliverables and engineering the products iteratively. During my tenure there, I participated in eleven projects (typically three to six months). I have shipped products using Golang, Kotlin, F#, Clojure, Haskell, Elm, Scala, Python, Javascript, and Java.

In November 2021, Chargebee acquired Ajira, and I joined as a Technical Architect.

During this stint, I helped revamp their entire release process. By streamlining their branching strategy and building tools to automate certain manual activities, I reduced the manual efforts in the release process to two hours from 14 hours.

Outside of this, I developed the foundation for the end-to-end test automation test cases. I have reviewed and advised various organizational initiatives as part of the governance team.

Then, I led Chargebee’s API Infrastructure revamp initiative. As part of this, I built a tool to create Open API specifications for the Chargebee APIs and set up the foundation for building SDKs from this spec. As a wrap-up, I led the team in building the API docs from this specification.

During this time, I was also responsible for researching and defining the direction for Chargebee’s Usage Based Billing capability.

Currently as a Senior Technical Architect, I am architecting and leading the team in a re-platforming work to enable Chargebee to provide an Omni-channel subscription management across multiple marketplaces like Apple App Store, Google Play Store, etc.

My Side Projects Career

Programming has been my favorite pastime activity ever since I saw the computer. I always build something to satisfy my intellectual curiosity using what I have learned or am learning.

It all started with building a website using HTML and CSS at fifteen. During my college days (2005-2007), I developed a blood donor directory application using C++ to exercise my OO skills. I made a distributed file search tool using Java Aglets for my final year project.

My Open-Source Journey started in March 2012 with a pull request to a tiny HTML-JS presentation library. Then, I open-sourced [Jade-Visualizer](https://github.com/tamizhvendan/jade-visualizer), an application I built while learning Node.Js. I fell in love with functional programming when using it in C#, leading me to understand Haskell. After dabbling with Haskell for some time, I wanted to put my learning into action and end up in F#.

I was one of the early adopters of F# in India. Based on the experiences I gained while working on a couple of F# projects, I self-published two books, F# Applied and F# Applied II; both are practical guides on developing web applications in F# using FP principles. I also authored a couple of open-source F# libraries, FsConfig and FsToolkit.ErrorHandling.

I have been actively working on an open-source product, HoneyEQL, for the past four years. It is a Clojure library that enables querying from relational databases (Postgres and MySQL) using EDN Query Language.

I have also been blogging since 2011. I have also spoken at various user group meetups and conferences, such as Functional Conf, SkillsMatter's F# Exchange, and F# Conference. My talks on Rethinking State Management, Building an e-commerce middleware in Clojure, and Concurrent Programming in F# were received well. I also authored a video course on Fsharp.TV.

I run my e-learning website, Learn CS in Tamil, which empowers people to create a fulfilling and sustainable career in the IT industry through courses, sessions, and podcasts in my regional language(Tamil).

Last but not least, I run my own SAAS product, Kalvify (Shopify for e-learning). As a solopreneur, I take care of everything from development to sales.