weRead/Lulu
Duration: January 2008 to August 2009
In order to have some startup experience, I joined Ugenie in January 2008. As part of the Ugenie experience I learnt end to end product design and development – understanding the needs of the customer, translating them to requirements, building the product/application, testing it, launching it and then analyzing the usage and finally translating that to more requirements. The 1.5 years that I spent in Ugenie has fundamentally changed my thinking and I am grateful to everyone in Ugenie for this wonderful experience. Ugenie was acquired by Lulu in August 2008.
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Noteworthy contributions are:
- Owned, architected, designed and developed Author’s corner in weRead – this is a platform for authors to interact with their readers. This single feature in weRead has attracted more than a million users till date. As part of this, I have done work in the following technologies: Drupal, Apache Solr, RRD tool. I have solved some interesting problems while building this platform, like author deduplication, author analytics tools, module based author profile pages, author indexing etc.
- SEO for our site: weread.com – weRead was initially built for Facebook and was not SEO friendly and I was responsible for ensuring that the site content is made more discoverable, navigable and indexable by search engines.
- Hi5 launch of weRead
- Internationalization of weRead
- Analytics – created a generic plug-in based log processor that is able to process HTTP access logs and extract metrics and then display them in an analytics dashboard for getting quick insights on feature metrics
- Owned, architected, designed and developed the weRead application for the Yahoo Application Platform making it the first book application to be launched on Yahoo. This application has been well appreciated by Yahoo and is taken as an example of how applications need to be built on YAP.
- Part of a 2 person development team, which worked on rewriting the poetry.com site (which is now Lulu Poetry) from scratch using the Python Django engine, Thrift, Apache Solr and the Magnolia CMS. The work involved designing, building and using Thrift services and migrating the legacy data to the new system on an extremely aggressive schedule. The Wikipedia article for poetry.com describes Lulu Poetry in more detail.
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