DANIEL SOOKNANAN

Software Engineer

Daniel received his B.Sc. and M.Phil. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of the West Indies in 2013 and 2019 respectively. His postgraduate research focused on the use of CUDA-based GPU computing in the analysis of smart grids and has been showcased in the IEEE-indexed 2016 SAI Computing Conference. Some of his past projects at Virtana include designing and implementing the Ventri tech stack, comprising an ESP32 running on Amazon FreeRTOS, AWS cloud backend and React web app, maintaining a Unity-based robotics simulator, and the rapid prototyping of UWB sensors for UAV applications.

Daniel is passionate about embedded IoT development and cloud computing technologies and, as a former lecturer in Electrical and Electronics Technology, is invested in the development of Trinidad and Tobago’s STEM education initiatives. Daniel enjoys traveling, immersing himself in different cultures and is fond of linguistics and learning new languages; presently he has an intermediate level of fluency in French. Being employed at Virtana has given Daniel a wealth of experience in the software engineering field and has aided in his career goals of becoming a well-rounded software engineer. 

Past Projects:

  • Embedded SW

    • Led the development of the full embedded stack for a low cost IoT sensor/device.  (2021/22, ESP32, FreeRTOS, AWS IoT Core)

    • Rapid sensor prototyping with ultra-wideband sensors and ARM-based microcontrollers for unmanned aerial vehicles (2022, nRF-SDK, FreeRTOS, C)

    • Lectured and administered content for a VHDL-based FPGA system design course

  • Web Backend

    • Developed a cloud backend solution for the processing & management of sensor data from a fleet of IoT sensors.  (2021, AWS IoT Core, AWS Amplify, AWS AppSync/GraphQL, AWS Lambda - Node.js)

  • DevOps

    • Deployed the continuous integration pipelines for a full stack IoT product.  (2021, AWS Amplify, AWS IoT)

  • App Front End

    • Developed a portable web app for surfacing and visualizing temporal IoT sensor data.  (2021, React, Javascript, AWS Amplify)

  • Simulation

    • Involved in the development and maintenance of a Unity-based robotics simulator; performed 3D modeling of robots and their environments, including interactable assets (2019, Unity, C#)

  • GPU

    • Developed a high performance, purpose-built, non-linear optimizer to help model grid-wide electrical loads.  (2019, C/C++, CUDA)