About Me

Sushanta Pokharel

pronounced: Sushant (soo-SHAAN-t)
pronouns: He/Him

I am a software development manager by profession, and I like to think about the different aspects of building software. Foremost, I am an engineer and building software is what I want to do, but I think that working in a team is the best way to do it, and hence the managerial path.

I have built many products (more than thirty when I started counting), in a team, or just grinding by myself. I have also worked in companies big and small, under a myriad of titles.

I love what I do professionally, in addition I'd like to share my work beyond what is is demanded by my job. Please feel free to browse through the blog, projects and books that I have written, or reach out to me.

Professional Career

Engineering Manager at Wayfair

2019 - 2024

After Deerwalk was acquired, I wanted to venture out and see how large scale development teams operate. Also, I wanted to get more time in engineering than management, so when I stumbled across senior engineer position in wayfair it seemed like a perfect match, although I leveled up and switched my career back to a more managerial position later.

Sr Development Manager at Deerwalk

2010 - 2019

Multiple Roles: Engineering Manager, Development Manager, Solution Architect

My journey here is quite long but over the period of 8 years I built a department of about 50 engineers and managers and developed multiple products for the company and the customers.

I gained a good understanding of data engineering and building scalable systems in large scale distributed architecture here, along with people management and architecting custom solutions to fit the customer's needs

Lead Developer at Javra

2007 - 2010

The company specialized in a very old database technology called Progress 4GL. They wanted to mordernize one of their flagship products and this is where my journey in this area started

I worked to integrate .NET with 4GL and did some quite interesting projects like creating a JPEG, and JPEG 2000 image decoder from scratch for some of their customers as R&D. This is also where I learnt C#, F#, XAML, ASP.NET and building efficient software in these platforms.

Skills

Technical

Data Engineering

language and frameworks: Map-Reduce, Hadoop, Hive, HBase, Elastic, AWS Kinesis, Apache Kafka, Goggle BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, AWS Lambda, Dataflow, Cloud Functions, Snowflake, SQL
design: data-as-product, data-governance, all aspects of data lifecycle (ingest, ETL, scrubbing, packaging as product, access and support) sync and async data architecture, data-lakes, data-warehouses, data analytics and development of KPI and metrics, data-modeling, mapreduce and no sql document architecture, building async data pipeline with streams (kafka, kinesis) and serverless technology, database optimization.

Application Engineering

languages and frameworks: .NET Desktop using C# (.net, .net-core, WPF, XAML), .NET web using C# and VB.NET (ASP, ASP.net, .net core), Java web development using spring and springboot, PHP (symfony and laravel), python (Django)
patterns and standards: SOA, microservices (six-sigma), MVC, MVVM, async distributed architecture, and all GoF patterns, testing (unit, integration, end-to-end), observability, operational excellence, engineering excellence and code quality.

Managerial

People Management

Hiring, Coaching, Mentorship, Building High-Functioning Teams

Product Management and Project Planning

OKR Based Planning, Jobs to be Done Based Planning, Capacity Planning, Solution Discovery based on Product Strategy, Execution Plans, Reporting

Software Development Process Management

Agile Software Development (scrum and kanban), Operational Excellence, Engineering Excellence, maintaining code standard, documentation

Skills

Technical

Data Engineering

language and frameworks: Map-Reduce, Hadoop, Hive, HBase, Elastic, AWS Kinesis, Apache Kafka, Goggle BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, AWS Lambda, Dataflow, Cloud Functions, Snowflake, SQL
design: data-as-product, data-governance, all aspects of data lifecycle (ingest, ETL, scrubbing, packaging as product, access and support) sync and async data architecture, data-lakes, data-warehouses, data analytics and development of KPI and metrics, data-modeling, mapreduce and no sql document architecture, building async data pipeline with streams (kafka, kinesis) and serverless technology, database optimization.

Application Engineering

languages and frameworks: .NET Desktop using C# (.net, .net-core, WPF, XAML), .NET web using C# and VB.NET (ASP, ASP.net, .net core), Java web development using spring and springboot, PHP (symfony and laravel), python (Django)
patterns and standards: SOA, microservices (six-sigma), MVC, MVVM, async distributed architecture, and all GoF patterns, testing (unit, integration, end-to-end), observability, operational excellence, engineering excellence and code quality.

Managerial

People Management

Hiring, Coaching, Mentorship, Building High-Functioning Teams

Product Management and Project Planning

OKR Based Planning, Jobs to be Done Based Planning, Capacity Planning, Solution Discovery based on Product Strategy, Execution Plans, Reporting

Software Development Process Management

Agile Software Development (scrum and kanban), Operational Excellence, Engineering Excellence, maintaining code standard, documentation

Interests

Engineering Management

Product Development

Leadership

OS Internals

DB Internals

General AI

Astronomy and Cosmology

Science Fiction