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Hi, I'm Aleks

Aleksandr Ulanov

Senior Full Stack Engineer (Independent Contractor)

Hi there, my name is Aleksandr Ulanov, and I’m a Senior Full Stack Engineer. I started web development in 2012 and gained strong knowledge and expertise in the field over time. I’m a huge fan of Ruby programming language and I know its ecosystem pretty well. That being said I was working with Ruby, Rails, Javascript and React most of the time I’m doing web development. But I’m not being limited by Ruby and Rails, so even though I had not much time to play with Python and Go, I’m still interested in both languages and always happy, when I have a chance to acquire experience with them. I’m also writing articles related to my experience in web development, Ruby, Rails, Python, JS and everything related to those.

Skills

Experiences

1
Independent Contractor

May 2017 - Present,

Working as an independent contractor with Learning Tapestry, Inc. Learning Tapestry provides innovation and infrastructure solutions to support learners and educators. Solving hard problems in complex digital learning environments.

Senior Full Stack Engineer (4mativ transportation project)

May 2019 - Present

  • The project includes planning, scheduling, tracking kids transportation to and from multiple schools across the US. Including communication between schools, parents, 4mativ administration.
  • Backend development (Ruby, Rails)
  • Frontend development (JS, React)
  • Transportation providers API integrations
  • My biggest contribution to the project is development of Automatic Vehicle Location system which uses Redis geospatial data for geofencing, integrations with quite a few (8 at the current moment) transportation service providers in the US for trips tracking and bookings. Working with Mapbox API, for real-time updates of vehicles/students/drivers on the map.
Senior Software Engineer (Sparkler app)

May 2017 - Aug 2019

  • Sparkler is an educatioinal app for kids mental and physical health and development. Sparkler app really stands out from all other apps in the field because of it’s advanced content recommender system which is based on childrens development progress and evolves with each action kid is performing on the app. Sparkler was acquired by Viacom-owned kids streaming service Noggin in 2019.
  • Architecture
  • Backend development (Ruby, Rails)
  • API development/integrations.
Senior Ruby on Rails Developer
Independent Contractor

Apr 2016 - Apr 2017,

Working as an independent contractor with Masterbee, Inc. The Masterbee app is a web application for fresh food ordering, delivery and administration

Responsibilities:
  • Backend development (Ruby, Rails)
  • API development
  • Legacy code optimization
2
3
Senior Ruby Developer
Teknavo

Aug 2015 - Jan 2016, St Petersburg, Russia - Leeds, UK

Teknavo was founded more than ten years ago to provide technical and management consultancy services for the worlds most respected organizations.

Responsibilities:
  • Worked on the Shift e-commerce platform for online retail in GB
  • Backend development (Ruby, Rails)
  • Frontend development
Ruby backend Developer
GS Group

Nov 2013 - Aug 2015, St Petersburg, Russia

GS Group (before 2013 known as General Satellite) is the largest Russian developer and producer of set-top boxes for television. Company products and technology concepts are used in satellite broadcasting projects NTV-PLUS, Tricolor TV, Platform HD

Responsibilities:
  • Core developer of kino.tricolor.tv multimedia portal for Russia’s largest satellite tv provider - Tricolor. Responsible for the development of the backend and UI of the movie portal, and it’s streaming platform.
  • Backend development (Ruby, Rails)
4

Recent Posts

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Real Time Ruby: Websockets, SSE or Long Polling?

Since Web 2.0, the web has been moving towards a more interactive experience. In 2004 we got AJAX requests (a short for Asynchronous Javascript And XML). AJAX allowed us to make requests to the server and update pages w/out reloading. This changed the web and started the era of web applications. But AJAX is not real time feature, so there had to be something else to give us ability for pushing updates to the clients as soon as we got them.

January 12, 2023 Read
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Using Rails Service Objects to Keep Code Clean

If you’re developing web apps using Ruby on Rails, you probably already know that Rails is an MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework, which means that you have your Models responsible for data, Views responsible for templates and Controllers responsible for requests handling. But the bigger your app gets, the more features it has - the more business logic you will have. And here comes the question, where do you put your business logic?

August 23, 2022 Read
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Building Responsive Rails Apps with Hotwire

If you’re developing modern single page applications with Ruby on Rails, you’re most likely using some fancy JS framework for your UI to be updated nicely, without page reloads. And there is really not much you can do without using them, that’s kind of a standard these days… until Rails got Hotwire. With Hotwire you can get fast and responsive web application, but without writing ton of Javascript. Well, sounds great, but what is Hotwire?

July 24, 2022 Read