Meet Riaz Virani | Rails Dev & Disrupter of the Dreaded Alarm Clock
The Iron Yard academy teaches intensive, three month courses that are churning out junior-level programmers into the Atlanta tech talent pool. Meet one of their recent graduates, Riaz Virani to hear about his experience at The Iron yard and what he is looking to do next. Right now he's building a motion and sound sensor that automatically turns off your alarm clock when you wake up before it chimes. Pretty cool.
What program did you just complete?The Ruby on Rails Program at The Iron Yard
What past tech projects have you worked on?
- OfficeHours: Product ManagerEarly stage startup that built tools to reinvent student/TA/instructor interaction online with frictionless real time collaboration. I led the development team from inception to MVP launch in about 3 months. I then continued to lead the team through launch of the mobile apps.
- Blackstone Technology Group: Process Engineer & Project ManagerTechnology consulting firm focused on the Federal government. Initially, I managed an effort to revamp the server acquisition process for a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency. I also helped design the business processes for how internal customers would engage with a "mobile carwash". That's essentially a service that provides shared development, build, and deploy tools for mobile apps developed by the various DHS agencies.
- Deloitte Consulting: ConsultantWorked on technology projects at Department of Health and Human Service, the Department of Agriculture, and the US Senate in pretty much every role, except developer. I helped write business cases, designed systems, tested systems, established change management processes, and even helped investigate other contractors for delivering broken systems.
What are your best technical or creative skills?Ruby on Rails, obviously! I also have been learning quite a bit of frontend javascript, including AngularJS. As a consultant, I worked on projects that used pretty much every enterprise technology, from Oracle ERPs to custom Java applications to business intelligence dashboards. I also have a background in video production, so I can shoot and edit pretty much anything.
What’s next on your list to learn?
I totally want to do some hardware hacking. I purchased an Arduino kit and have a ton of ideas of how to hook up my Rails apps with Arduino sensors and displays.
What’s your ideal internship/job?
I would love to work for a company that is building a mass market Internet of Things product, especially if the product is affordable and really simple to use. Some people are skeptical that the internet of things will really be happen. What tomfoolery!
Interested in startups?
Absolutely! That's where the party is at.
Post graduation plans?
Find a job with a smaller/medium sized company that is building an awesome product (hopefully an IOT based product) and continue to expand on my Iron Yard final project, YoThumb, which makes it crazy simple to get real time feedback from any crowd using their mobile phones.
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