About Me

Bio

I am currently a Business Intelligence Developer/Analyst at Bank of America. I am responsible for creating and supporting ELT data pipelines for multiple applications. I have used various tool sets in my current and prior roles: SQL Server and Oracle 11g, SQL Server Integration Services for creating data pipelines and Business Objects for creating reports.

Education

I have a BS and MS in Computer Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Some of my most memorable courses include: (There were other good courses, but these three stand out because of the applied nature of the final projects and how much I learnt doing them.)

CS350: Computer Organization and Assembly Language

Final project: Create a simple RISC CPU from simple digital gates and download the design on an FPGA to perform simple arithmetic operations.

CS351: Systems Programming

Final project: Modify the MINIX OS kernel to add customizations and change the process scheduler algorithm.

CS425: Database Organization

Final project: Create a database engine that implements the CREATE TABLE and SELECT operations.

MS Thesis

For my MS degree I took the thesis option in addition to regular course work. I worked with my thesis advisor to create a custom USB interface for a neuroprosthesis microchip: Custom USB Interface for Neuroprosthesis.

What this Blog is all about?

In addition to what I do at work, I also like to learn as much as I can about the state of the art. My main goal for blogging is to share what I have learnt in my explorations.

My specific interests lie in the field of Data Engineering and Distributed Systems Architecture. Although it is difficult to become an expert in multiple domains in a short period of time, my goal is to continue learning and figure out how all the pieces fit together and then go deeper and try and solve real world problems.

Research and References

Here are some of my favorite research and reference resources:

General Computer Science

  1. ACM: Industry research publication for Computer Scientists.
  2. ACM Queue: Industry publication for Practitioners.

Data Engineering

  1. Databricks Engineering
  2. Airbnb Engineering
  3. Bitly Engineering
  4. Twitter Engineering
  5. Google Developers
  6. Facebook Engineering
  7. Linkedin Engineering
  8. Microsoft Engineering
  9. Microsoft Research
  10. Amazon AWS Architecture
  11. Amazon CTO

Books

Programming Languages

  1. Effective Python
  2. Programming Elixir
  3. Elixir in Action
  4. Phoenix Web Development

Distributed Systems

  1. Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Algorithms

  1. Algorithms Illuminated: Part 1: The Basics
  2. Algorithms Illuminated: Part 2: Graph Algorithms and Data Structures