Parham Doustdar's Blog

My Résumé

Parham Doustdar

  • Almere, the Netherlands
  • +31-6-4720-7253
  • [email protected]
  • https://www.parhamdoustdar.com

I’m currently a manager and back-end developer working in Booking.com core infrastructure as part of the team developing Shipper.

At work, I help our team feel better, be more productive and grow. I’m a manager since February of 2019, so I have a lot to learn.

At home, I play the piano, read books on psychology and management, and try out different kinds of food with my wife, Bita.

Technical Skills

Likes: Go

Dislikes: html, css, javascript, perl, node.js, ruby

Experience

Team Lead & Developer, Booking.com, September 2016 – Current

  • I’ve been a team lead and member in the team that came up with and created Shipper, which is Booking.com’s open-source project to make rolling out a multi-cluster application on Kubernetes an enjoyable experience.
  • I am the vice chair of B.Able, which is an internal employee resource group to create an environment where people with diverse physical and neurological needs feel supported to do their best work.

PHP Programmer, TENA, April 2014 – July 2016

phalcon, phpunit, codeception, vagrant, liquibase, zabbix, mockery, go, java, android, redis, puppet

  • I mentored my fellow developers and kept them motivated. One developer went on to become a vice-president of in his next job, and another went on to become a skilled front-end developer with a career
  • I rewrote the company’s legacy code, reducing bugs to zero and making the software maintainable. This allowed new features to be added a lot faster, and allowed business owners to gather data on metrics they had no visibility into before.
  • I introduced unit testing to the business, setting a standard of above 95% and sticking to it. This drastically lowered the number of regressions in our software.
  • I introduced a service-oriented architecture to promote high-availability clusters, easier scaling of services, and making applications manageable.
  • I helped our devOps team manage micro-services through writing automated Puppet scripts.
  • I wrote a superfast web server for a software the company had purchased, with built-in load balancing, queuing, and recovery mechanism. I did this with Go and Redis.
  • I created a simple Android application so that our customers would be able to open our website in their mobile phones.

Team Lead, Business-X, March 2013 – April 2014

yii, phpunit, fitnesse

  • Mentored my fellow developers to write better code and improve their communication skills
  • Created and managed processes that would serve alongside XP (extreme programming) and/or Kanban, making it easier for the product team and developers to communicate
  • Created APIs and libraries, used by the controller and view layers of the application. This allowed less senior developers to write code faster
  • Worked on essential parts of Business-X, like the sign up procedure and importing content from other social media
  • Managed a team delivering the “marketing” subset of features. This included presenting information in graphs from local data and Facebook, and creating a framework so that other platforms could easily be added in the future

Web Developer, SEO Specialist, Smartt, March 2011 – March 2013

yii, Groovy

  • Mentored my fellow developers to write better code, and communicate better
  • Talked to customers in person and turned their requirements into specification
  • Worked on ConnectTheDoc, which is a platform to connect patients to doctors. This ended up being one of the projects that brought in the highest amount of revenue
  • Worked on CheetahWorks, which was an internal application written in Groovy to allow employees in Iran and Canada to collaborate. This turned into the tool for coordinating tasks across teams

Education

Associates, Western Tehran Azad Islamic University, 2008 – 2010

visual-basic, .net, php, postgresql, operating-system, vbscript

Projects & Interests

ConnectTheDoc, http://www.connectthedoc.com/

php, yii

We connect patients and healthcare providers through digital referrals to save both parties time and money. How it Works for Your Patients >How it Works for Your Healthcare…

I was a back-end programmer in this project, writing the model and service layer.

Business-X, http://www.business-x.com/

php, yii

A business community like no other, in addition to networking and collaborating with business professionals on Business X and social media, Business X enables business growth by showcasing credibility, understanding the market, identifying sales prospects, and providing smart tools to convert prospects to customers.

I was a back-end programmer in this project, writing the model and service layer, and also the leader of the team developing the marketing module, which allows users to analyze their customers' behavior.

Elf, http://www.hamrah7.com/

phalcon, php

Elf is the back-end for the VoIP application called Asan Pardaz. This project allows users to buy credits from two of Iran's leading phone service provider companies, purchase plain/train tickets, and get credits for making international calls.

I was responsible for the API endpoints providing information to monitoring systems, and for designing and refactoring the recharge process; where requests to web services are made and fail overs are handled.

Shipper, https://github.com/bookingcom/shipper

Shipper is an extension for Kubernetes to add sophisticated rollout strategies and multi-cluster orchestration. It lets you use kubectl to manipulate objects which represent any kind of rollout strategy, like blue/green or canary. These strategies can deploy to one cluster, or many clusters across the world.

Writing

Re-introducing PDO: the Right Way to Access Databases, http://www.sitepoint.com/re-introducing-pdo-the-right-way-to-access-databases-in-php/

Parham re-introduces PDO ahead of the PHP 7 launch, preparing you for a transition from the soon-to-be removed insecure and deprecated mysql extension!

The State of Accessibility in PHP Tools, http://www.sitepoint.com/the-state-of-accessibility-in-php-tools/

Parham Doustdar talks about a much ignored issue in the world of coding - accessibility. Which tools do it right? Which ones do it wrong? Find out!

Popular Users per Language and Region with Silex and Github, http://www.sitepoint.com/popular-users-per-language-region-silex-github/

Parham Doustdar builds a leaderboard app with Silex and Github's API in which you can easily find out the most popular users of a language in a region

Tools

First Computer: Intel Pentium 166 MHz desktop CPU

Favorite Editor: Emacs + Emacspeak

Background

I’m a completely blind manager. I began as a developerthat got to learn programming with no books in his first language, Farsi. I learned programming by reading books from wonderful authors, and getting to know them through their books as my mentors.

From the first day I went to work, I was regarded as a senior programmer, due to the knowledge I had gathered while playing around at home. Since I like meeting new people, getting to know them, and learn from them, I began learning from anyone who knew something more than me, and quickly drew myself up to be regarded as a programmer that delivers high-quality work that allows everyone to sleep easy at night.

In 2016, I was hired by Booking.com, where i had the experience of being surrounded by people who knew a lot more than I did. After working my way through the initial confusions of being the one and only developer who was completely blind, I started managing the Shipper team in the February of 2019.

Do you want to hire me? You can do so using the contact form!