Akif Patel, Developer in San Francisco, CA, United States
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Akif Patel

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Cryptography Developer

Location
San Francisco, CA, United States
Toptal Member Since
June 25, 2021

Akif is a skilled developer with experience in full-stack web and mobile development. Due to his intensive involvement in competitive programming, he is very knowledgeable about data structures and algorithms. Akif has used that knowledge to develop a project to detect anomalies in data sources at Google.

CryptographyAlgorithmsPythonFlaskPython 3jQueryC++Chrome ExtensionsWeb ScrapingAndroidBootstrapHaskellREST APIsMongoDBGoogle Cloud Platform (GCP)Reverse EngineeringData StructuresPyGameFlumeCompetitive Programming

Portfolio

MealMe
Python, Flask, MongoDB, Reverse Engineering, Static Analysis, Scraping...
DIMACS
C, Cryptography, Databases
Google
C++, Flume, TensorFlow, Python, Bazel, Clojure

Experience

JavaScript - 5 yearsPython - 5 yearsFlask - 5 yearsCryptography - 5 yearsC++ - 4 yearsData Structures - 3 yearsCompetitive Programming - 3 yearsAlgorithms - 3 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Linux, Vim Text Editor, Ubuntu, Git

The most amazing...

...thing I've achieved is reaching the rank of international master on the competitive programming site Codeforces.

Work Experience

Software Engineering Intern

2021 - 2021
MealMe
  • Improved MealMe's scraping technologies using my reverse engineering and CTF skills.
  • Scraped multiple food delivery services for all their restaurants in the US using AWS clusters for menu and restaurant info.
  • Prepossessed (and merged them across services) and compiled these into a MongoDB database. Used algorithms and machine learning to make a search engine on them for restaurants and food delivery.
  • Created the entire internal customer support, including in-app chat, for MealMe.
Technologies: Python, Flask, MongoDB, Reverse Engineering, Static Analysis, Scraping, Crawlera, Heroku, Redis, WebSockets, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), C++, Web Scraping, Bootstrap, React, GraphQL

Research

2020 - 2020
DIMACS
  • Performed research in the area of data structures and cryptography under Martin Farach-Colton.
  • Worked on making a key-value store on a disk that is authenticated and secure.
  • Researched how to make Merkle Tree constructions more efficient for verifying traversals of different types of graphs.
  • Applied these results to B^epsilon trees and the BetrFS filesystem.
Technologies: C, Cryptography, Databases

Software Engineering Intern

2019 - 2019
Google
  • Wrote a part of a pipeline in C++ and Flume to process hundreds of billions of data signals and categorize anomalies.
  • Made a web dashboard for visualizing and monitoring information about these anomalies.
  • Integrated this dashboard to automatically alert teams at Google about anomalies in their data sources.
Technologies: C++, Flume, TensorFlow, Python, Bazel, Clojure

Cloud and Mobile Developer

2017 - 2018
Flyermatch
  • Wrote a framework to scrape grocery flyers from various grocery chains in Canada.
  • Used Google Cloud Platform to run image recognition and document analysis to extract the deals for that grocery store.
  • Worked on integrating this framework with the back-end Python server.
  • Coded the first iteration of the Android app to display deals and allow searching and clipping.
Technologies: Google App Engine, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Image Recognition, Android, CherryPy, Python, SQL

Software Developer

2017 - 2017
Kidnetic
  • Wrote a web app to allow parents, who were dropping their kids off, to enter their personal information into and sign an electronic waiver form.
  • Made the admin side to allow searching and aggregation of waiver data.
  • Created a script that formatted the data for any given waiver into a PDF and allowed the admin to download it.
Technologies: CherryPy, MongoDB, Bootstrap, JavaScript, jQuery, Python, PDF

SuperWires

https://pypi.org/project/SuperWires/
SuperWires is a FOSS Python graphics library for making games and similar programs that I wrote. It works on top of Pygame and allows for rapid and easy development. Over 30,000 people have downloaded it on PyPI.

Reddit Fetcher NTP

https://github.com/Maltysen/reddit-fetcher
A Chrome extension that changes the new tab page into a live stream of images from selected subreddits. It uses the Reddit REST API along with the Chrome extension API. It supports a variety of image types and even scrapes Imgur links (which are common on Reddit). I wrote it for a friend who wanted to keep up with his favorite memes.

BrainFreeze

https://github.com/Maltysen/Brain-Freeze
BrainFreeze is a multiplayer real-time online word puzzle game I developed. Players race against the clock and each other to find common letters among two lists. It is written in CoffeeScript and Python and uses Socket.IO.

StackTalk

https://devpost.com/software/slacktalk
Conversations naturally proceed like a stack (pushing is going deeper into a topic, popping is finishing a topic). StackTalk is a mobile app that uses machine learning and speech recognition to allow people to easily push and pop onto a shared stack that represents their conversation to make discussions more productive. This was a hackathon project with me and a friend. I built the Android app and speech recognition side of it.

Pypartial

https://pypi.org/project/pypartial/
Pypartial is a Python library that allows the use of partial function application notation in native Python. I developed this because I really enjoy functional programming, and I use the library in my day-to-day coding. It allows for kwargs, empty positional args, and methods, among other features.

Languages

C++, Python, JavaScript, Python 3, C, Haskell, Clojure, CoffeeScript, Java, SQL, GraphQL

Frameworks

Flask, Django, Bootstrap, CherryPy

Libraries/APIs

jQuery, Pygame, Node.js, SQLAlchemy, React, REST APIs, TensorFlow, Socket.IO, Reddit API

Tools

Vim Text Editor, Flume, Bazel, Crawlera, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Git

Other

Cryptography, Algorithms, Data Structures, Capture the Flag (CTF), Competitive Programming, Reverse Engineering, Scraping, Abstract Algebra, Games, Chrome Extensions, Web Scraping, Graph Theory, Complexity Theory, PDF, Static Analysis, WebSockets, Operating Systems, Graphics, Speech Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, Image Recognition, GPT, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT)

Paradigms

Functional Programming

Platforms

Android, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google App Engine, Heroku, Linux, Ubuntu

Storage

MongoDB, Redis, Databases

2018 - 2021

Bachelor's Degree (In Progress) in Computer Engineering

Rutgers University - New Brunswick

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