Sawood Alam - Research Lead, Wayback Machine at Internet Archive

Sawood Alam

Research Lead, Wayback Machine at Internet Archive

Norfolk, Virginia, United States

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Summary

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Senior

🎓

Top School

Sawood Alam is a Research Lead for the Wayback Machine at Internet Archive with 12+ years of experience building web applications and advancing semantic web and digital library research. He blends hands-on engineering in Ruby on Rails, Python, Go and frontend stacks with applied machine learning to improve web archiving and metadata systems. His academic background (MS and PhD work at Old Dominion University) underpins projects that bridge research and production, from digital library prototypes to large-scale archival tooling. An active open-source contributor, he localized moment.js for Urdu—including meridiem parsing and unit tests—highlighting deep attention to internationalization and right-to-left language support. Based in Norfolk, VA, he brings a rare mix of language-aware engineering, archival domain expertise, and Docker/Linux-based operational fluency.

12 years of coding experience

14 years of employment as a software developer

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at Old Dominion University

B Tech, Computer Science, B Tech, Computer Science at Jamia Millia Islamia

Urdu, Hindi, English, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit

Stackoverflow

Stats

93reputation

11kreached

2answers

1question

Github Skills (14)

unit-testing10

momentjs10

localization10

javascript10

http6

html6

go6

api6

routes6

raml6

jsoup6

parsing6

server6

angularjs-directive6

Programming languages (23)

JavaCSSCMakefileTeXScalaValaGo

Github contributions (5)

moment/moment

Dec 2016 - Jan 2017

Parse, validate, manipulate, and display dates in javascript.

Role in this project:

Localization / Internationalization Specialist

Contributions:5 commits, 1 PR, 6 comments in 1 month

Contributions summary:Sawood's primary contributions revolve around adding and enhancing the Urdu locale for the moment.js library. They added initial Urdu locale translations, including months, days, and formatting options, and implemented the correct meridiem parsing and formatting. Additionally, the user created and integrated unit tests for the newly added Urdu locale, ensuring the correct date and time formatting behavior.

validationnpm-packagejavascriptnodejsdates

internetarchive/web_collection_search

Aug 2022 - Dec 2022

An API wrapper to the Elasticsearch index of web archival collections and a web UI to explore those indexes.

Contributions:6 reviews, 30 commits, 11 PRs in 3 months

apiweb-uisolrapi-wrapperexplore

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