SMALLPEARL

Hari Mahadevan

Hari Mahadevan (何瑞理) founded Smallpearl and leads every project it takes on. Hari has been building software since 1993, from device drivers and Windows security software to desktop applications and cloud platforms. Much of that work was greenfield, starting from a blank page, and some of it was for Junglebyte, a company Hari co-founded and ran in Singapore.

Experience

Smallpearl, Taipei — Founder

2018 to now

  • Started working on QQDEN full time in 2016, researching the problem and building the skills for cloud development, before founding Smallpearl.
  • Building QQDEN, a building management platform for facility management companies, and PapaGuǎn, a private lesson-video platform for tutors.
  • Turnkey projects for clients, including KensingtonWorks, software for Kensington's trackballs and mice on Windows and macOS, with its own kernel drivers. Others include a virtual web camera based on OBS and a laptop lock that works over Bluetooth Low Energy.
  • Open source libraries for Django and Angular, including django-popupcrud, deploy-django, crispy-mat-form and ionic-mono.

IBM Security, Taiwan — Advisory Software Engineer and Lead

2010 to 2016

  • Led Host Protection for Windows, IBM's security software suite for Windows.
  • Found and fixed long-standing critical bugs that crashed Windows (the "blue screen"), making the product much more stable.
  • Started and led a refactoring of the code that made the product significantly faster and more stable. Management recognised it with a special bonus.

Junglebyte, Singapore — Co-founder and Principal Developer

2000 to 2009

  • Co-founded a bootstrapped startup to build and sell Teach, software for managing computer classrooms.
  • Was the principal developer, designing and building many of its components from version 1 to version 4.
  • Also ran the business: strategy, product releases, hiring, customer relations, exhibitions, tenders and finances.

Creative Technology, Singapore — Senior Software Engineer

1993 to 1999

  • Developed device drivers for Creative's audio products on IBM's OS/2. Wrote the first Sound Blaster driver for OS/2 in C, which IBM recognised.
  • Ported Creative's AWE32 and AWE64 software from Windows to OS/2, building the layer it needed on top of the OS/2 API.
  • Wrote the first Sound Blaster driver for the PowerPC Reference Platform, ported from Windows.

What Hari works on

  • Cloud platforms: turning a business's workflow into software, keeping each customer's data separate, security, and REST API design.
  • The whole stack: device drivers, middleware, desktop applications, and cloud and mobile apps.
  • Platforms: Windows, macOS, and apps for several platforms from one code base.
  • Languages and frameworks: C and C++, Python, TypeScript and JavaScript, Django, Angular, Ionic and Docker.

Writing and open source

Hari's full career history is on LinkedIn. Hari writes about software on the Smallpearl blog and on the Language and Speech Lab blog at Academia Sinica. Hari's open source work is on GitHub.

Education and languages

Hari holds a Master's degree in Computer and Information Science from the National University of Singapore. Hari speaks English, Chinese, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam.