Charles Cook, Ph.D., Developer in Gainesville, FL, United States
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Charles Cook, Ph.D.

Verified Expert  in Engineering

C# Developer

Location
Gainesville, FL, United States
Toptal Member Since
July 29, 2014

Charles has a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and spent three years developing custom data processing and analysis programs for NASA. He specializes in scalable, enterprise-level application development and engineering solutions for exceptionally high throughputs. He is also the founder and owner of GreatVocab.com, for which he developed the core system using novel concepts in data analysis and control theory.

Portfolio

Array
Go, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, SQL
GreatVocab.com
SQL, ASP.NET MVC
Syndigo
C#, Azure Service Bus, Azure Blobs, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure DevOps

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Vim Text Editor, MATLAB, Visual Studio, GoLand

The most amazing...

...thing I've coded is a new computational fluid dynamics (CFD) algorithm utilizing my new mathematical scheme to solve for any fluid.

Work Experience

Principal Software Engineer

2022 - PRESENT
Array
  • Engineered and deployed an enterprise messaging system at scale.
  • Automated version control and tracking of massive legacy databases with automatic sanitized generation scripts.
  • Performed data reconciliation of 2+ billion record data sets.
Technologies: Go, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, SQL

Owner

2009 - PRESENT
GreatVocab.com
  • Founded GreatVocab.com, a novel online vocabulary training program.
  • Developed the core implementation of the system by utilizing some novel concepts in data analysis and control theory applied to vocabulary learning.
  • Implemented the program with the help of a custom enterprise-scale web application framework and rendered it capable of finding published in-use examples of any word in the English dictionary on demand.
Technologies: SQL, ASP.NET MVC

Principal Software Engineer

2019 - 2022
Syndigo
  • Migrated enhanced content from Webcollage, SellPoints, and other acquired products, such as content analytics, into Syndigo's platform, representing most of all visible eCommerce product content on the public internet.
  • Developed the image comparison algorithm powering the Compare with Live tool single-handedly.
  • Led a team using the Agile methodology in the development of enhanced content.
Technologies: C#, Azure Service Bus, Azure Blobs, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure DevOps

GSRP Fellow

2011 - 2014
NASA
  • Developed a large degree of freedom model regression code utilizing CUDA for the acceleration of genetic algorithms.
  • Developed custom signal processing code for analyzing high frequency vibration data.
  • Developed custom CFD models for cryogenic fluids.
Technologies: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), NVIDIA CUDA, OpenFOAM

Gastwissenschafter

2010 - 2010
WSL-Institut für Schnee- und Lawinenforschung SLF
  • Served as a key international collaborator between the Computational Multi-physics Group and the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF.
Technologies: Fortran, C++

Senior Web Developer

2003 - 2009
352 Media Group (352, Inc.)
  • Specialized in core component design (such as content management systems) and large scale applications (distributed web applications and high throughput applications) as a Microsoft Certified Professional web programmer.
Technologies: JavaScript, SQL, ASP.NET, C#

Great Vocab

http://www.greatvocab.com
Great Vocab is a novel online vocabulary training program which utilizes some of my work in data analysis and control theory applied to the learning of vocabulary with the help of a custom enterprise-scale web application framework. The application is capable of finding published in-use examples of any word in the English dictionary on demand.

Content Management System

I designed and developed a CMS that was successfully deployed in hundreds of commercial web applications and was one of the first to allow in-place editing, content versioning, full-text search, and dynamic menu building in 2008.

Twitter Caching Service

I designed and developed a service which exposed a Twitter 1.1 API providing automatic, expiring, and rate limit observing caching of calls to Twitter. The cache was implemented through a custom cache paradigm I designed that allowed for bursting. The cache data store was asynchronous, dependency injected, and demonstrated in SQL CE and NoSQL databases, both with auto migrations for self-hosted deployment.

Search System with Plugin Support

I designed and developed a search system which has a plugin interface to allow any other content provider to populate the search system. The search system provides full-text catalog searching over any content source with a management system for custom weighting of content and associated keywords with their weighting (to control the position of content in results). The system also has reporting for metrics such as searched expressions, view to click ratios, view and click counts, searches that had no results, popular searches, and overall activity reports.

Facebook Content Submission Application

I developed an application which allows users to submit images and videos through a Facebook application that is then reviewed by a moderator before being posted to a Facebook gallery. The application supports a basic voting system and categorization.

Highly Concurrent Web Application Architecture (2008)

I designed and prototyped a large-scale web application tiered vertically and distributed horizontally using WCF with load balancing. An early version of the application was published as the Unifico Framework in 2008.

Event Clinics

http://www.eventclinics.com
Dynamic registration system for organizers in the equestrian community with adaptive payments.

Magnetic Relief Valve (Patent)

http://technology.nasa.gov/patent/KSC-TOPS-50
Inventors at NASA's Kennedy Space Center have developed a magnetically retained fast-response pressure relief valve that is designed to fully open at precise cracking pressures and that operates in a fully open/fully closed manner.

US9845898

Engine that Uses Cryogenic Energy Storage to Improve Vehicle Fuel Efficiency and Greatly Reduce Fossil Fuel Dependence (Patent)

https://ufinnovate.technologypublisher.com/tech/Engine_that_Uses_Cryogenic_Energy_Storage_to_Improve_Vehicle_Fuel_Efficiency_and_Greatly_Reduce_Fossil_Fuel_Dependence
Utilizes heat from existing exhaust to recover cryogenically stored renewable energy, more than doubling fossil fuel efficiency.

US10480353

Customer Relationship Management Application

https://crm.vantageproduction2.com
A CRM SaaS application for the mortgage industry. I received a Certificate of Excellence from UCG and Vantage for my work on the project, where I was a full-stack developer.

A Generalized Characteristic-Based Split Projection Method for Navier-Stokes with Real Fluids

A new computational approach for the general numerical simulation of compressible natural convection flows with real fluid properties.

Realtime Gait Analysis of the Knee (Biomedical)

Based upon academic literature, developed numerical methods and engineered a solution to perform real time non-linear Newton-Raphson to six coupled equations in vanilla JavaScript, with singular value decomposition (SVD).

Custom Database Engine for Time Series Data

Designed and developed a custom database engine in C++ for time series (event) data with filtering, bucketing, JSON-defined calendar timelines, aggregate functions, which is O(n) for all operations, highly concurrent (linear with 120+ cores), entirely vectorized, with a buffered asynchronous REST JSON API where throughput is limited by NVMe throughput, processing 3GB of discrete event data in .2 seconds.

Plotly JS Big Data Charting

Designed and developed a custom JavaScript dashboard showing interactive live minutely market data over the span of a decade with sub-second load times, where all data is computed on demand using event-driven data.

Full-stack Phone Adviser Development and Support

Developed and supported the various web applications and APIs used to run a phone based adviser company, including payment processing, event/notification subscription and distribution, web applications with live agent statuses, internal administrative dashboard, custom content management system (CMS), funds and minute balance accounting for customers with O(1) calculation time, REST APIs for the cloud based phone system, with all services being load balanced with health monitoring (AWS) for zero down time of REST APIs.

Cryogenic Power Extraction

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170009607A1
Inventor: Various examples are provided for cryogenic power extraction. In one example, among others, a system for cryogenic power extraction includes a heat exchanger that can heat a cryogenic working fluid using exhaust heat from a heat source, and a turbine that can generate power from the heated cryogenic working fluid. In another example, a method includes heating a cryogenic working fluid with waste heat from a heat source and driving a turbine with the heated cryogenic working fluid. Power produced by the turbine can be used drive a mechanical load and/or generate electricity for use by an electrical load. For example, waste heat from a combustion engine of a vehicle can be used to generate power for driving mechanical loads of the engine and/or to generate electricity for charging a battery of the vehicle.

Languages

SQL, C#, JavaScript, HTML5, PHP, C#.NET, C, C++, Active Server Pages (ASP), Fortran, Python, Go, YAML, Java, Visual Basic

Frameworks

ASP.NET, ASP.NET Web API, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Forms, .NET, Telerik Kendo UI, Bootstrap 3+, Bootstrap, AngularJS, Knockout (Knockout.js), .NET Core, Angular, Boost

Libraries/APIs

LINQ, Proxygen, Plotly.js, jQuery, Node.js, React, Breeze.js, Twitter API, Windows Forms (WinForms), Folly, Entity Framework, NCache, MPI, VTK, Facebook API, Open MPI

Tools

Dapper, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Subversion (SVN), CVS, Git, MATLAB, Amazon EBS, AWS ELB, Visual Studio 2019, Shell, TeamCity, NuGet, Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio 2015, LabVIEW, LaTeX, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2012, GCC, CLion, Visual Studio, Vim Text Editor, Eclipse IDE, GoLand, Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, OpenFOAM

Paradigms

Object-oriented Programming (OOP), REST, Test-driven Development (TDD), Scalable Application, Load Testing, Dependency Injection, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Entity-relationship Diagrams, App Development, Unit Testing, Agile Software Development, Waterfall Development, Microservices, Azure DevOps

Platforms

iOS, Visual Studio 2017, Windows, NVIDIA CUDA, Ubuntu, Amazon EC2, Android, Azure, Visual Studio 2016, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure PaaS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Eclipse, WordPress

Storage

Relational Databases, Microsoft SQL Server, NoSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Azure Blobs, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Elasticsearch

Other

Numerical Methods, Scientific Computing, Physics Simulations, Software Development, Software Engineering, Freelancing, Machine Learning, Programming, Content Management Systems (CMS), Mobile App Development, IT Networking, Amazon Route 53, User Interface (UI), Software Architecture, Remote Work, Scientific Software Developer, Front-end Development, Full-stack, Performance, OData, Ajax, Multithreading, VMware ESXi, Signal Processing, HTML5 Audio, Google Pub/Sub, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Xamarin.Forms, Azure Service Bus

2011 - 2015

Ph.D. Degree in Aerospace Engineering

University of Florida - Florida

2009 - 2011

Master's Degree in Aerospace Engineering

University of Florida - Florida

2004 - 2009

Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

University of Florida - Florida

NOVEMBER 2007 - PRESENT

Microsoft Certified Professional Developer

Microsoft

OCTOBER 2007 - PRESENT

Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist

Microsoft

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