Ahmet Aladag
Verified Expert in Engineering
Back-end Developer
Istanbul, Turkey
Toptal member since September 28, 2021
Ahmet is an ex-Amazonian and ex-Doister with more than 12 years of professional experience, four of which he's been working remotely. Ahmet excels at back-end engineering and possesses data science, text mining, and front-end skills. Ahmet loves working with the Python/Django stack and building products that make life easier for people.
Portfolio
Experience
- Back-end - 20 years
- Python - 15 years
- Machine Learning - 6 years
- Scikit-learn - 5 years
- Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) - 5 years
- Pandas - 5 years
- Django - 3 years
- Python 3 - 3 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Python 3, Django, PostgreSQL, Redis, Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS), HTML, PyCharm, MacOS, Python
The most amazing...
...project I've done was to develop suicidal ideation detection via ML. It surfaced potential at-risk people and provided support before they committed suicide.
Work Experience
Founder
Harmonytics OÜ
- Developed a machine learning model that predicts whether the author of a text has expressed suicidal ideation or not.
- Constructed a web-based application to annotate (label) Reddit posts to be used in classification tasks.
- Led a team of two front-end developers in the build of a recruitment platform for a specific industry which included defining the requirements according to stakeholders, designing the architecture, and implementing the back end.
Data Engineer
BP
- Led data engineering initiatives to enhance software quality. Established and promoted data engineering best practices.
- Developed and maintained a Python package with extensible classes and utility functions for data engineering, which is now widely used across multiple teams at BP.
- Streamlined data pipeline development, resulting in more than 50% reduction in development time and number of bugs.
- Implemented testing for data pipelines, increasing code coverage. Encouraged colleagues to do so.
- Authored and enhanced documentation for improved knowledge sharing.
- Provided guidance and mentorship to fellow data engineers.
Back-end Developer
Doist
- Developed an app that allows Slack users to import their account settings and conversations into the Twist app.
- Integrated the Apple sign-in process for Twist and Todoist apps.
- Implemented features like closing threads and email confirmations and also maintained the code.
- Detected and fixed bugs and impactful security vulnerabilities.
- Introduced incident severity levels to the company, resulting in a support triaging system with a profound strategy.
Software Development Engineer
Amazon.com
- Architected a project that allows corporate users to bulk import office addresses; this included gathering business requirements, preparing the BRD, performing security analysis, and writing an extensive security document, including a threat model.
- Fixed bugs on the Amazon Business checkout and address selection pages.
- Improved the company and team documentation significantly by creating tools to make daily routines faster and reduce the operational workload.
- Created a machine learning model that predicts which teams are potentially responsible for new issues.
R&D Engineer
Fikrimuhal Teknoloji
- Designed the microservice architecture and algorithms for HiveCDN (a P2P-supported CDN) project and implemented the back end and front end. Used Scala and Node.js.
- Wrote two grant proposals for R&D projects (HiveCDN and a PaaS platform) with 100% approval success.
- Built the CI/CD infrastructure with Apache Mesos and Jenkins.
- Implemented a project called Statique that converted documentation files on Dropbox into a website.
R&D Engineer
AGMLab
- Led the link analysis team in charge of the Turkish search engine running on a cluster of 100+ servers.
- Implemented graph-based distributed ranking algorithms (Giranking) with Apache Giraph and performed their integrations to Apache Nutch, Solr, and HBase.
- Developed a proxy-and-sync mechanism of BuluttDepo's (a Dropbox clone) desktop application for Turk Telekom.
Co-founder | Software Lead
Woramo
- Developed Woramo.com, a social network for sharing product/service reviews online.
- Managed the team and the tasks; also designed the architecture and implemented the site as a full-stack developer.
- Followed a lean startup design process which included defining the problem, creating personas, conducting interviews, building a landing page, and estimating product demand.
Research Assistant
Kadir Has University
- Developed a desktop app called Robinviz that visualizes protein-protein interaction networks.
- Published one conference paper and two journal papers, one of which had more than 140 citations so far.
- Taught data structures and algorithms, Java, and Python to undergraduate students.
Experience
Psikas
http://www.psikas.comAmazon Business Bulk Address Importer
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=help_search_1-1?ie=UTF8&nodeId=201613230&qid=1598306078&sr=1-1I was the owner of the product, and I gathered business requirements, prepared BRD, designed the software architecture, performed security analysis, and wrote extensive security documents, including a threat model. The project was carried out while working at Amazon.
Suicidal Ideation Detection
https://www.jmir.org/2018/6/e215/I used text-mining tools to extract features like sentiment analysis, LIWC (linguistic inquiry and word count), and bigrams. Then I used logistic regression, random forests, and support vector machine algorithms to build the models and make predictions.
Slack to Twist Importer
https://blog.doist.com/slack-to-twist-importer-tool/I was the back-end developer for the project, designed the architecture, and implemented the code in Python.
Cryptocurrency Management App
Istanbul Public Transportation Network Analysis
https://www.emrealadag.com/istanbul-transportation-network.htmlI scraped the route and stop data from the Istanbul Municipality City SDK using Scrapy. Then I constructed, visualized, and analyzed the Istanbul public transportation network with R.
Blog Posts on Scraping and Data Mining
Robinviz | Bioinformatics Software
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvV0UDdVwMAIt performs clustering on protein-protein interaction networks according to co-expression and co-ontology and then visualizes these graphs. Then it takes reliability scores into account during the visualization.
SPINAL: Scalable Protein Interaction Network Alignment
https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/29/7/917/253874Given the protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks of a pair of species, a pairwise global alignment corresponds to a 1-to-1 mapping between their proteins. Based on the presupposition that such a mapping provides pairs of functionally orthologous proteins accurately, the results of the alignment may then be used in comparative systems biology problems such as function prediction/verification or construction of evolutionary relationships.
We provided a polynomial-time heuristic algorithm, SPINAL to solve this problem. We showed that based on the accuracy measures used in relevant work, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Our algorithm does not suffer from scalability issues, as such accurate results are achieved in reasonable running times as compared with the benchmark algorithms.
Statique | Static Documentation Server
https://github.com/fikrimuhal/statique/tree/dropboxOptionally, it watches for changes in your Dropbox folder, then compiles all your Markdown files into HTML with Pandoc when any change is detected. It also provides a hook URL so that it can copy and rebuild the Markdown files upon a change in your Dropbox folder.
Access can be restricted with passwords and permissions. Each folder can be assigned special permissions via files in the config folder.
Giranking
https://github.com/aladagemre/girankingWe ran my algorithms on a cluster of 100+ nodes running for a search engine. The rankings were used to sort the search results.
Django Friendship Network
https://github.com/aladagemre/django-friendship-networkI Implemented the whole project. It allows you to construct a social network and provide a faster experience for querying friendship relationships. It supports friendship requests and approvals as well.
Co-occurrence Network Constructor
https://github.com/aladagemre/zargan-networkI implemented the code and ran it on the data provided by the leading dictionary Zargan.
With the assumption of the fact "terms searched consecutively are more likely to be related," I created a co-occurrence network and with some pruning, the network turned out to be a semantic network suggesting relationships between the nodes. The network is suitable for a word representation approach in machine learning projects.
A Recruitment Platform for a Particular Industry
Education
PhD in Computer Engineering
Boğaziçi University - Istanbul, Turkey
Master's Degree in Computer Engineering
Kadir Has University - Istanbul, Turkey
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
Işık University - Istanbul, Turkey
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Scikit-learn, Pandas, CCXT, NetworkX, Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), REST APIs, Django ORM, Python API, OpenAI Assistants API, OpenAI API, NumPy, SQLAlchemy, WebRTC, RxJS, PyQt 4, Matplotlib, Stripe API, Web API, PySpark, Node.js, React, Beautiful Soup
Tools
GitHub, ChatGPT, Git, PyCharm, LaTeX, Mesos, Apache Giraph, NGINX, Jira, Microsoft Excel, Celery, Jenkins, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), AWS Glue, AWS CloudFormation, RabbitMQ
Languages
Python 3, Python, Python 2, HTML5, HTML, JavaScript, SQL, Java, Crystal, Perl, Scala, R, CSS
Frameworks
Scrapy, Django, Bootstrap, OAuth 2, Akka, Play 2, Django REST Framework, Spark, Next.js
Paradigms
Back-end Architecture, Unit Testing, Object-relational Mapping (ORM), Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Microservices, Web Architecture, Management, Distributed Computing, Testing, REST
Platforms
MacOS, Linux, Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jupyter Notebook, Docker, Google Ads, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2
Storage
JSON, Databases, MySQL, Neo4j, NoSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), PostgreSQL, Redis, Amazon DynamoDB, Memcached, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, MongoEngine
Other
Social Network Analysis, Text Mining, Back-end, System Design, R&D, Network Analysis, Algorithms, Technical Writing, Scraping, Web Scraping, Software Engineering, Document Parsing, Startups, Architecture, Data Mining, CSV, SaaS, Machine Learning, Remote Work, CI/CD Pipelines, APIs, Lean Startups, Authentication, Data Engineering, Data Science, Remote Team Leadership, Cloud, Command-line Interface (CLI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), JupyterLab, OpenAI, OpenAI GPT-4 API, ChatGPT API, Artificial Intelligence (AI), API Integration, FastAPI, Back-end Development, Full-stack, OpenAI GPT-3 API, Data Visualization, Software Architecture, Web Security, Grant Proposals, Threat Modeling, Business Requirements, Team Leadership, Payment APIs, User Authentication, HAProxy, AI Chatbots, Chatbots, LangChain, Llama 3, Groq, Large Language Models (LLMs), Full-stack Development, Containerization, Software as a Service (SaaS)
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