ARPITA DEY

Powersuite 2017-2021

Advanced Energy Economy, my last employer, is a trade association and renewable energy policy advocacy group. Powersuite was originally created to serve their policy team's need to discover and track the progress of regulatory dockets and legislative bills across all state legislatures, all state public utility commissions, congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It was subsequently made available by subscription to all kinds of energy stakeholders from other advocacy groups to utilities to major energy consumers like Walmart to educational institutions. Powersuite is a Rails monolith that pulls in data from scraping infrastructure built on the python Scrapy framework. I mostly spent my time on the Rails side of things splitting my time about equally between managing technical debt and developing new features.

Before I left AEE, I worked on a major project that I'm particularly proud of. In the US, the electrical grid is made up of seven regions operated by seven regional transmission organizations (RTOs). Powersuite users had long expressed the need to be able to search and track the activities of the many committees that make up these RTOs. Using what I'd learned from troubleshooting our legacy scraping infrastructure in the previous years at AEE, I built a lightweight performant transparent scraping system from scratch in Go and integrated it with our larger system of text extraction and indexing into Elasticsearch to make RTO committee documents searchable and trackable for Powersuite users.

Commercial remote solar monitoring solution 2017

Ampion, my employer at the time, is in the solar asset management business. I was brought in to develop a remote solar monitoring solution for large commercial solar systems. This was a dream project for me since once of my favorite previous projects was prototyping a remote solar monitoring solution on a smaller scale for residential solar systems. For this project, I wrote code that lived on mini Linux devices in the field that would poll Modbus enabled measuring devices and send that data back to our servers. I also wrote the server code that handled monitoring of and communication with those mini Linux devices and I wrote a Rails dashboard for remotely configuring the devices.

Sunscope: Democratizing the solar site survey 2016

Sunscope started out as an attempt to democratize the solar site survey. I wanted the solar curious to be able to use their smartphone to survey a potential mount surface to determine how many kWh it could produce annually and what kind of return on investment they could expect by going solar based on rebates and tax credits available for their area. Should their return on investment look good, they could share their site data with and solicit bids from installers nearby. I imagined installers on the platform having access to advanced survey tooling like shade analysis and simple project management functionality. I still think about building a CRM for solar installers, but this project is now defunct.

Wynd: On-demand pickup, packing and shipping 2015

Wynd is an iOS application for businesses and individuals who would rather have someone else handle their packaging and shipping needs. The application allows a user to take a picture of an item, enter shipping information about it and tap a "Request pickup" button. Requesting a pickup allows a courier in Wynd's network of couriers to accept the pickup request and head over to pick up the item from the user. Depending on where the item is going, the courier then either takes it there him/herself or hands it off to a Wynd warehouse where it is packed and shipped. The founders pitch Wynd as "Uber for shipping". Wynd took from me any semblance of a work life balance in 2015--and thankfully I can say that the learning experience was well worth it.

Solar Reporter: Residential remote solar monitoring solution 2012-2013

American Solar Partners, a solar installer based in Westchester and my employer at the time, was finding available remote solar monitoring solutions prohibitively expensive and difficult to install. I prototyped a low cost plug and play custom solution which was deployed to monitor over 60 residential solar systems. By following the steps in the installation manual I drew up, installation was easy enough for customers to do it themselves quickly and easily--thus with no added installation cost. Due to the many different technologies involved in this project, I had the opportunity to use almost every major technical skill in my tool belt at the time as well as develop some more esoteric skills like implementing proprietary serial networking protocols common in industrial machine networking as well as exploring sockets programming in C on a mini Linux distribution. I also enjoyed incorporating feedback from end users into both software and hardware updates over the course of development. Solar Reporter allows customers to view their solar power generation metrics in a web portal built with Ruby on Rails, while ASP can view these metrics for all of its monitored customers. Should a customer's system throw an error or warning (e.g. ground fault, grid detection error, etc) that potentially requires maintenance, ASP is alerted and informed of the nature of the problem so they may respond quickly and efficiently.

Solar project management solution 2013-2014

For a solar installer like American Solar Partners, my employer at the time, the design and construction of solar systems is only part of their work. A given solar project involves selling the project to the customer, managing paperwork for utility level rebates and federal and state tax credits, managing financing paperwork, managing permitting for construction and interconnection, designing the system and managing its construction. ASP found that what commercially available solar project management software was available could not be customized to fit their needs and so began this ongoing project. Residential solar project managers at ASP use this application daily to do anything from logging notes on phone calls with customers to automatically generating solar feasibility reports for potential customers. The application also gives easy access to aggregate data on sales, project progress and many solar specific metrics along with data on employee activity for use by higher level managers.

Soma: Gynecological health indicator tracking application 2010

Soma helped women chart their cervical fluid quality, basal body temperature and cervical position daily in the interest of being equipped to make informed decisions about their fertility and general gynecological health. I was inspired to develop Soma not too long after I had graduated with a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering, when I discovered that I knew much more about the functioning of a V8 engine than the functioning of my own reproductive system! It was through this project that I taught myself the fundamentals of user facing application level programming from both a technical and business standpoint. I learned many common user facing application design patterns through the medium of Objective-C and Apple's Cocoa framework. I also handled customer support requests, feature requests and general feedback.