Taylor D. Edmiston
I'm a generalist software engineer experienced in building software across the stack and infrastructure for high-growth tech startups.
I'm ranked in the top 4% on Stack Overflow (all-time) having reached over 5 million software professionals.
Professional
My current technical work is largely around Docker, CI/CD, Terraform and related DevOps tooling. I'm also very highly experienced with Python.
My technical interests include:
- Trying new technology at the earliest stages
- Architecting, designing, and developing backend systems and APIs as part of a core platform team
- Building things to simplify people's lives and automation are a few things I really enjoy
- I value: simplicity, scalability, quality, elegance, and maintainability
Personal
- On a personal note, I'm passionate about coffee and enjoy traveling
- I've visited 9 countries on 4 continents and one of my life goals is to fill a passport
Misc
- I'm ranked in the top 1% on Codewars
python
Mandolin is a feature-rich interactive livestreaming concert platform.
- Platform / Infrastructure Lead
- Software architecture
- DevOps & infrastructure
- API design & full-stack development w/ backend focus
- Mentor, pairing, code reviews, etc
- Wearer of many hats (and many shoes)
Co-organizer of the group behind the leading annual hackathon and monthly tech meetup in Cincinnati.
- AngelHack Cincinnati 2014 (winner), 2015 (co-organizer)
- HackCincy 2017, 2018 (co-organizer)
A Python web app with custom made dynamic karma counters running as AWS Lambda functions that pull from APIs like Stack Overflow and Hacker News.
Open git repos from Sublime Text in Tower
(See QCBrunch project below.)
A lightweight multicolor noise generator.
I wrote this script to block out background noise like conversations in open office spaces and coffee shops (it was originally written in Jan 2014 while working at a startup accelerator). It's just a few lines of code but serves as a practical utility that I use with noise-isolating earbuds every day.
A log of books I'm reading and my notes about them.
The selection represents topics that I care about in the world, such as: startups, entrepreneurship & remote working; programming; investing & finance; minimalism & simplicity; travel.
This project also occasionally covers conferences, essays, and podcasts.
My goal is to disseminate knowledge from smart, inspirational people more broadly.
A utility for bulk moving tabs across browsers.
Tangram Flex creates systems re-engineering software for the defense industry to make complex embedded systems adaptable, modular, and secure.
- My role was DevOps lead and engineer with responsibilities including research, architecture, platform design and development, cloud infrastructure, etc
- Attended DockerCon 2019
- Obtained DoD DSS security clearance (Secret level)
More info:
Astronomer is a SaaS customer data platform that routes clickstream events to client and server-side integrations, and runs ETL pipelines in Airflow.
My role is as a software engineer building the core platform.
- Create big data pipeline services for streaming micro-batch workloads from Kinesis / Kafka using Apache Spark Streaming as well as batch dynamic DAGs with complex dependencies using Apache Airflow
- Create and maintain the Clickstream DAG and data warehouse loader that handles copying hundreds of millions of rows of event data into Amazon Redshift instances for customers
- Create, manage, and run services on DC/OS, Marathon, and Mesos; write custom Airflow Mesos executor
- Present talks on Airflow and Astronomer at conferences and meetups
- Deploy Astronomer Open and Enterprise Edition (EE) installs to Kubernetes clusters on GCP
- Completed extensive custom install with platform expansion and customization for the data analytics arm of a Fortune 50
- Create Helm charts for Kubernetes
- Configure continuous integration and continuous deployment of Docker images via CircleCI
- Instrument and advocate for code quality tools including running linters via Code Climate
- Mentor other developers in Python tooling and best practices and provide code reviews
- Debug internal systems issues from JavaScript front end through backend services and data warehouses and provide technical customer support
- Support customers on our platform in learning and using Apache Airflow including creating, writing, and debugging DAGs, operators, hooks, etc
- Manage release and distribution of Astronomer Python packages
- Help interview Airflow committers for The Airflow Podcast
- map(automate, all_the_things)
Accelerator: AngelPad #9, DigitalOcean Hatch
More info: astronomer.io
A Helm plugin to delete and purge all releases from Kubernetes
User event data routing for clickstream analytics. Capture user events and route them to the best tools and data warehouses.
A collection of the best web analytics services and tools for most companies.
Boa is a Python package for normalizing and converting strings to snakecase.
Its use case is to normalize customer-provided names into a form usable in Amazon Redshift schemas, tables, and columns.
- Contributed pull requests to various open source projects for event sponsored by DigitalOcean
I wrote a post about building our new highly scalable analytics event processor in Python with Kinesis, Spark Streaming, and Airflow.
Why does data engineering matter and where is it going? Recently I had the opportunity to do a collaborative blog post with Maxime Beauchemin about Airflow and the future of data engineering.
I think every founder or potential founder should follow justinkan on Snapchat. With his experience & role at Y Combinator (YC), I think Justin is in a unique position to share a glimpse at companies changing the future. This post discusses three startups I discovered from him.
Lisnr is a platform for sending data over audio using inaudible tones.
- As a member of the core team, I created and maintained backend APIs powering mobile SDKs embedded in apps used by tens to hundreds of thousands of people, as well as a CMS web app built in Angular
- My role as a senior engineer spanned architecture, design, implementation, testing, performance analysis, mentorship, and code review
- I traveled to NYC for about a month to participate in the R/GA Techstars Accelerator 2014 (the predecessor to Techstars IoT)
More info: Technology
QCBrunch is a collection of the best breakfast and brunch spots in Cincinnati.
As a passionate brunch fan, I built QCBrunch after seeing a void in the data collected and options provided by Yelp, Foursquare, and Google for breakfast and brunch. Two key differentiators are: I track the hours that brunch is offered, link directly to brunch menus.
Open source: https://github.com/tedmiston/qcbrunch
More info: Hello, Queen City Brunch!
Some thoughts around language traction and the future of Python. It front paged Hacker News receiving over 4k unique visitors.
This Medium post details the history of Lisnr and the conference South by Southwest.
The Brandery '13
- 3.7 GPA (deferred graduation)
- Completed coursework in distributed systems, cloud computing, computer vision, pattern recognition, information retrieval, etc
- Researched vehicle target tracking using computer vision algorithms
- Added MBA coursework in leadership and management
- Deferred further research to focus on startups
- Graduated magna cum laude / 3.8 GPA
- President of ACM
- My senior design capstone project created an input system in a virtual reality CAVE where viewers wearing VR glasses run dynamic commands to control the Appenzeller Visualization Laboratory environment via an Android app
- Paper: Touch-Enabled Input Devices for Controlling Virtual Environments
- Collaborators: Adam Golden, Adam Meily
- Advisor: Dr. Thomas Wischgoll, Director of AViDA
- I participated in the II/ALE academic leadership study abroad program for three weeks in Zhongli, Taiwan
- The program consisted of international lectures, a cultural exploration component, and an extensive group project with a final presentation
- Overall there were ~100 students with majors in business and engineering (all disciplines) from the US and Asia
- Qualified for Mensa in elementary school