Afsal Thaj

Expert Overview

Principal Consultant
Simple Machines

Simple Machines, Consultant

I am a Software Developer/Consultant, in Simple Machines, a technology consultancy in Australia that always strive to develop high quality purely functional software.

I have been working in Sydney for the last 5+ years. I started in CBA as an ETL developer, and most of the time, I worked as Feature Engineering (Data Engineering) Squad Lead.

Later on, I moved to Simple Machines as a consultant, and enjoying here for the last 3 years. I have got the rest of my experience as a developer in India.

Interests:

I believe in writing robust software that has a high positive impact on business. During recent years, I strongly felt my passion as to build frameworks and libraries with the help of functional programming constructs, and enjoy releasing it to production with zero bugs ! With my personal time learning Haskell, I do enjoy the power of FP in JVM world through Scala.

Blogging and sharing knowledge:

I am active in blogging programming concepts in general, principles that we should follow, and you can find my latest blogs here: https://medium.com/@afsal.taj06 and gists in https://gist.github.com/afsalthaj

Open source contributions:

I have got commits in various projects across languages.
The latest project that I author and maintain is zio-config (https://github.com/zio/zio-config), which unveils simplified version of advanced functional programming with Scala. I have also got a few other pet projects as you will see in my GitHub (such as a safe-string-interpolation to disallow meaningless logging in applications, which is not quite exciting but always my favourite)

What next?

It makes me excited to share my experiences deploying applications that sticked on to principles of Functional Programming. This year and coming years, my focus will be on sharing this wonderful experience that had tangible business outcomes that resulted in less number of re-iterations and bug fixes. By doing this, I intend to improve adoption of Functional Programming in the industry surrounding me!

Things I'm Doing
 
Talks I've Given

Talks I've Given