Alex Chapman
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Irvine, CA, United States
Toptal member since May 8, 2017
Alex is a generalist software engineer who loves making things. He has 10 years of experience working on content management systems, big data pipelines, web apps, tools, and video games. He's wildly comfortable doing just about any sort of software development of a higher level than C++. Alex loves making people happy and making things he's proud of.
Portfolio
Experience
- JavaScript - 6 years
- C# - 4 years
- Unity3D - 4 years
- Python - 4 years
- MySQL - 4 years
- AWS SDK - 3 years
- Ruby - 2 years
Preferred Environment
Vim Text Editor, Visual Studio, Perforce, Git, Ubuntu, Windows
The most amazing...
...project I've ever did was to build a WordPress clone for a CMS which was exposed to content consumers for UGC purposes—I designed and built every part of it.
Work Experience
Senior Software Engineer
Blizzard Entertainment
- Worked on the Hearthstone team to develop new out of game features like the Heroic Brawl.
- Fixed a countless, almost never-ending cascade of bugs through both one-off methods and medium-scale refactoring of legacy code.
Software Engineer
Riot Games
- Built a custom ETL pipeline for the big data team in Ruby.
- Built an analyst facing web app in JavaScript using Backbone. It allowed for managing ETLs with a rich templating system that catered toward a region shared multi-database environment.
- Built and iterated on an R&D game using Unity3D for the client and C# game and utility servers on the back-end.
Software Engineer
Zope Corp
- Worked on the Z4M CMS platform. Developed both the Python server back-end and the HTML5 front-end web app.
- Worked on a customer loyalty phone application using Cordova.
- Maintained and built onto a huge suite of automated tests including E2E payment processing.
- Did standard DevOps-related tasks like managing deployments and debugging faulty instances.
Experience
Hearthstone Work
http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/20720845/wild-heroic-tavern-brawl-is-coming-5-2-2017FuETL
We built the back-end pipeline in Ruby and delegated all the heavy lifting to the databases themselves rather than attempting to do things like cross database joins and out of band transformations since those are fraught with peril. Essentially our software managed scheduling, templating, and all other job metadata for processing data.
I also built the front-end by myself using Backbone and Bootstrap. I wasn't actually allotted time to do so, but saw that it was desperately needed by analysts. It was quite a hit and is used by every member of the team.
Z4M
- A video transcoding pipeline.
- A UGC system for reader submitted content including moderation by site administrators.
- Automated the deployment scripts to handle the rolling restarts of all our server instances.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science
University of Mary Washington - Fredericksburg, VA, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
jQuery, Backbone.js, Facebook API
Tools
Microsoft Visual Studio, AWS SDK, Git, Perforce, Visual Studio, Vim Text Editor
Frameworks
Unity3D, Zope, Dojo
Languages
C#, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, C++, SQL, HTML5
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MySQL, Amazon DynamoDB
Platforms
Ubuntu, Windows, iOS
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