Personal details
Chris R.
Technical skills
About
Over the last 15 years, I've worked as a teacher, a support engineer, a data engineer, and a software engineer. In all that time, the most engaging and satisfying work was always helping other people learn and overcome challenging issues.
I have professional experience with the following languages/technologies:
- Python
- Java
- Bash
- Web (HTML, CSS, JavaScript/TypeScript)
- SQL (multiple dialects)
- Korn
- Perl
- C
- Android
- Docker
- Linux
- Git
I've developed everything from simple scripts that automate repetitive tasks, to ETL pipelines, to full stack web applications (the API and backend services, as well as the HTML/CSS/JavaScript frontend), and along the way I've mentored engineers, students, and non-technical people wanting to level up their skills.
Work Experience
The bulk of my time at Palantir was split between their Data team, and the Product Development team. On the data team, we initially built bespoke ETL pipelines in Python, landing the data in PostgreSQL databases that we managed for other teams (e.g. the Finance team and HR). Eventually we pivoted and began dogfooding a product built by Palantir's product team, which required re-writing the pipelines in Java.
After about 1.5 years of dogfooding, I had amassed a significant amount of insight into what it was like to use the product as a daily power user, and so began a rotation with the product team to help develop some features I thought could improve the product. The rotation was meant to last about three months, but at the end of the three months, it was requested that I stay on the product team full time.
Ultimately, I spent about 4 years maintainingboth the frontend(TypeScript/React) and backend services (Java). I single-handedlydeveloped many features from conception, through the API changes, to the frontend, and assisted in the design, review, and testing of many other features developed by team members.
Mycroft AI was developing an open source voice assistant (the project is now maintained by Neon AI). Based on work I had been doing as a community member, they brought be on as a part time contractor to flesh out their IoT support, specifically to ensure intercompatibility of multiple hardware eco systems (e.g. simultaneous support and control for both Phillips Hue lights and Wink lights).
In addition to the IoT work, I also fixed bugs in the intent parser, improved the parsing of numbers from strings (e.g. "set a timer for three and a half minutes" -> "set a timer for 3.5 minutes"), and performed extensive refactoring of the code base, to reduce duplication and improve maintainability.