Farhan Kathawala

Farhan Kathawala

Full Stack Web / React Native Developer

Biography

Hi! 👋 Welcome to my personal website. I’m a full-stack developer with 3 years of experience in frontend development (worked with Angular and Vue back then, now I mostly work with React/React Native) and 3 years of experience in backend development, writing and maintaining APIs and microservices. I also have 2.5 years of experience automating service provision and application setup on AWS/Azure/GCP.

Currently I work at Shopify, solving all kinds of interesting technical challenges in the shipping and logistics space while working on the Shopify Fulfillment Network.

Previously I worked at Passed Plates - helping rescue surplus food in restaurants around SF, SAP and Lively Inc. I’ve also interned at StartX and Stanford’s CVGL.

Fun fact: for a brief period of time I was involved in writing a Monero miner ⛏️

In my free time, I like to read and write poetry 📖. I also like to turn old computers into Linux 🐧 servers at my house and blog about what I do with them.

Interests

  • React / React Native / Expo
  • Django
  • Node
  • DevOps
  • Robotic Process Automation

Education

  • BSc in Computer Science, 2017

    Stanford University

Recent Posts

Using Material Design / Material UI in a React Native App

Hamburger menus, drawer navigation, Floating Action Buttons, and Contextual Action Bars. Add all these and other Material Design goodies to your app seamlessly
Jun 28, 2021 11 min read Programming, React-Native, Mobile App Development

Build a Google Maps style panel overlay with scrollable inner content in React Native using rn-sliding-up-panel and react-native-maps

Draggable panels exist on most modern apps with a map component (think DoorDash, SpotAngels, Google Maps), but implementing such a panel with scrollable inner content isn’t easy. Here is a way to implement that type of panel with seamless draggability and content scrolling in React Native
Jan 3, 2021 7 min read Programming, React-Native, Mobile App Development

Build an NPM Package with Expo Dependencies for Expo and Plain React Native Apps

A guide to publishing NPM packages meant to be used in Expo and plain React Native apps, especially if your packages depend on Expo libraries
Nov 16, 2020 8 min read Programming, React-Native, Mobile App Development

How to Save Files to a Device Folder using Expo and React-Native

Save files to a device’s internal storage so that it’s publicly visible to other apps with one line of code
Nov 10, 2020 5 min read Programming, React-Native, Mobile App Development

Free, One-Command, Self-Hosted Commento Deployment for a Hugo Site

I couldn’t find a turnkey, one-command solution to self-host my preferred comment section service on my site, so I wrote my own.
Sep 22, 2020 4 min read DevOps

Hiding API Keys on React Native in 10 Minutes with AWS API Gatweway

The popular react-native-google-places-autocomplete library asks you to paste your third-party API keys in frontend code, which is pretty insecure. But you can stay secure without wasting a whole day on a custom workaround. Here’s how.
Sep 7, 2020 7 min read Programming, DevOps

Popular Topics

Ansible AWS Commento DevOps Expo Hugo Javascript Material Design Material UI Mobile App npm Programming React-Native React-Native-Paper Terraform Typescript

Projects

expo-file-dl

An npm package for expo and/or react-native apps (supports both managed and bare workflows) to download content from any remote URI to any publicly accessible folder on the device. Notifies users about download progress as well.
expo-file-dl

Gerbera (mobile app)

A mobile interface for the Gerbera media server (formerly MediaTomb). Let’s you download any media from your media server to your phone, edit any entries in your media database, and configure any scanning behavior for your media server to recognize new content.
Gerbera (mobile app)

Gist

A bash script which posts any input as a GitHub Gist. Allows for private Gists, descriptions, and other goodies.
Gist

Graffiti Map

An R/Shiny webapp displaying up-to-date, reported incidents of graffiti in San Francisco (with images!)
Graffiti Map

Rewards Bot

Microsoft Rewards (formerly Bing Rewards) automator built with Selenium. Did searches for you and filled out quizes to earn you gift cards from Microsoft. Was maintained for 2 years (before the anti-bot detection became stronger than my will to keep up development!)
Rewards Bot

Weather Widget

A clean, attractive, simple weather widget, all in one <script> tag. Made with Fomantic-UI – a community fork of Semantic-UI. Provides current weather and a 5 day forecast.
Weather Widget

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Software Developer

Shopify

Mar 2021 – Present Remote
I work on the Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN): tackling challenges related to 3rd-party logistics (3PL) and helping make the merchant experience delightful for shop owners new to large-scale fulfillment and shipping.
 
 
 
 
 

Lead Developer

Passed Plates

Aug 2019 – Mar 2021 Daly City, CA
Brought a mobile marketplace app from idea to fully-functional product with a team of 2 other devs. Was in use by dozens of restaurants in San Francisco. The app securely handled user authentication, financial transactions, barcode scanning, geolocation information, and much more, all powered by a backend built on django, DRF, and postgreSQL with full test coverage (pytest) and automated CI/CD (ansible/terraform)
 
 
 
 
 

Software Developer / Product Manager

SAP

Mar 2018 – Aug 2019 Palo Alto, CA

Participated in the following rotations as part of the highly selective SVNT program:

• Software Developer – SAP.iO – Built frontend data viz components (the product was a geospatial data viz tool) and backend services. Used: Vue, Node, MapBoxGL, AWS (ECS)

• Product Manager – Data Custodian – turned customer feedback into user stories and guided their implementation with a group of engineers. Used: SAPUI5, AWS, Azure. GCP

 
 
 
 
 

Software Developer

Lively Inc.

Sep 2017 – Mar 2018 San Francisco, CA
 
 
 
 
 

Research Assistant

Stanford CVGL

Jun 2016 – Sep 2016 Stanford, CA
 
 
 
 
 

Software Developer Intern

PasureMap (StartX)

Jun 2015 – Sep 2015 Palo Alto, CA

Accomplish­ments

Hands-On-Math – Top 8 (Wolfram Alpha Prize)

TreeHacks Feb 2016
Wrote a web app in 3 days to help teach kids how to graph functions by showing them the structure of the function they draw a on coordinate plane. Won a prize and placed in the Top 8 at a university hackathon

Contact