Josh Rai

Current

• Extranet & Web Developer at Taproot Foundation

Past

• Software Developer at Oodle
• Software Developer (contractor) at Johnson & Johnson
• Technical Manager and Software Developer at BabyCenter.com

• Software Developer at I.Consulting Corporation

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Education

• Brown University

Connections

122 connections

Industry

Internet

Josh Rai’s Experience

• Extranet & Web Developer

  Taproot Foundation

  (Non-Profit; Non-Profit Organization Management industry)

  October 2005 — Present (3 years 10 months)

  The Taproot Foundation enables the delivery of pro bono consulting services to nonprofit organizations across the US, and partners with the corporate sector to institutionalize the pro bono ethic into that sector. It offers "service grants", rather than financial grants, to nonprofits, by assembling teams of consultants from the marketing, IT, HR and strategy management professions to complete six-month part-time pro bono consulting projects for them.
  
  My role is to develop the Internet-based tools used by staff, pro bono consultants and nonprofit clients to support these operations. We rely largely on in-house-developed software, but also interact with open-source software solutions and "cloud" services, to enable a unique system of CRM, grant management, recruitment, project management, reporting, and financial management.

• Software Developer

  Oodle

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

  January 2005 — September 2005 (9 months)

  Oodle acts as a search engine for a vast variety of local and national online classified-ad websites. I wrote Perl scripts to crawl specific websites, parse their listings, and feed the data into Oodle's database. I also worked with product and marketing managers to define a web-based database of charity organizations that accept donations of various types of goods, and implemented the application in PHP.

• Software Developer (contractor)

  Johnson & Johnson

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; JNJ; Internet industry)

  September 2002 — November 2004 (2 years 3 months)

  Through BabyCenter.com, which was acquired by J&J and took on a consulting capacity in web development for other J&J business units, I was the lead developer reimplementing the Johnson's Baby consumer products website (johnsonsbaby.com), working with their staff to craft a content management tool that they could use, and implementing it in Java and JHTML in the ATG Dynamo application framework. Also through BabyCenter, I was one of a small team of developers to implement Walmart.com's Baby Products area.

• Technical Manager and Software Developer

  BabyCenter.com

  (Public Company; 51-200 employees; Online Media industry)

  April 1997 — June 2002 (5 years 3 months)

  Worked with technical director to develop the prototype for, and launch, http://www.BabyCenter.com/, which quickly became the web's leading resource for new and expecting parents. Continued to develop internal tools for the company's editorial staff as well as public-facing features of the site. Was a lead team member in the development of the system driving BabyCenter's targeted, stage-based email newsletters and campaigns, which became a cornerstone of the business and an early model of email marketing, supporting millions of outbound emails per day to subscribers. Was technical lead for the development of the back-end systems supporting BabyCenter's online store, handling about 1000 orders per day. Did server-side development of websites and email systems for other Johnson & Johnson companies after J&J acquired BabyCenter.

• Software Developer

  I.Consulting Corporation

  (Internet industry)

  November 1995 — March 1997 (1 year 5 months)

  Worked as a software consultant for several companies. Helped develop a first-generation templating language for BroadVision to allow its customers to build custom web interfaces to its e-commerce system. Worked at Netscape to create some of the first demonstration applications for LiveWire, their server-side JavaScript-based application server.

Josh Rai’s Education

• Brown University

  BA , Computer Science; Religious Studies , 1990 — 1995