Anthony Garvan, Developer in Chicago, IL, United States
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Anthony Garvan

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Location
Chicago, IL, United States
Toptal Member Since
March 19, 2017

Anthony is a top-tier full stack web developer (Python/JavaScript) and data scientist (SQL/Python) with 10 years of experience building software for everything from to playing poker to predicting hurricanes. His working style is fun, communicative, consistent, and collaborative.

Portfolio

General Services Administration | 18F
Full-stack, JavaScript, Elasticsearch, SQL, React, Python
Freelance Work
Scikit-learn, SciPy, NumPy, Django, Python
ZS Associates
HTML, JavaScript, C#

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Git, Atom, Linux

The most amazing...

...weekend project I've done is a visualization of the 20,000 most common words in English that were positioned by their meanings in vector space.

Work Experience

Data Lead

2015 - PRESENT
General Services Administration | 18F
  • Acted as the tech lead for the Federal Election Commission's new legal search portal, making their legal documentation (laws, regulations, etc.) easily searchable online.
  • Wrote Checklistomania—an enterprise checklist tool optimized for onboarding that reached #4 spot on hacker news.
  • Helped, as the data lead, the organization collect and implement the best practices around data storage and management.
  • Wrote Coffeemate—a slackbot designed to break down silos within a remote organization by pairing people up for virtual coffee.
  • Managed a team of 5—including 1:1s, problem resolution, and biweekly meetings.
Technologies: Full-stack, JavaScript, Elasticsearch, SQL, React, Python

Freelance Developer

2013 - 2015
Freelance Work
  • Developed and deployed a statistical model to predict niche domain name profitability.
  • Conducted an evaluation of high-performance messaging systems (RabbitMQ & Kafka), and built prototypes to determine the performance for high-volume payment data.
  • Built a poker bot capable of playing optimal statistical strategy (no bluffing) in real online poker games.
Technologies: Scikit-learn, SciPy, NumPy, Django, Python

Senior Software Engineer

2013 - 2015
ZS Associates
  • Led the research and implementation of a business rules engine for sales alignment decisions.
  • Wrote the Social Infograph—a MEAN stack app for exploring textual data.
  • Conceived of and implemented a rapid analytics process for analyzing social media from a key conference—including automatically categorizing Twitter authors into predefined types and running SQL workflow to produce data for visualizing social activity for clients.
  • Categorized audio files to detect topics for call center assistance.
  • Implemented standard organizational duties: mentoring, stand-ups, sprint planning, and pairing.
Technologies: HTML, JavaScript, C#

Chief Technology Officer

2012 - 2012
Index Companies, LLC
  • Acted as the primary developer and architect behind a platform for a predicted hurricane landfall on the East Coast based on 1 TB of satellite weather data.
  • Presented findings to the CEO on a weekly basis, and presented findings to Warren Buffet's GenRe.
  • Achieved a near parity with analytical methodologies with a purely statistical approach.
Technologies: Neural Networks, MATLAB

Research Assistant

2011 - 2012
Columbia University
  • Built a web-based tool for calculating the high resolution carbon footprints at a massive scale.
  • Discovered a new algorithm to reduce the carbon footprint calculation complexity from O(n^2) to O(n).
  • Effected impacts including: code deployed at Ben & Jerry’s and a publication in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.
Technologies: HTML, jQuery, JavaScript, C#

Senior Instrumentation Engineer

2007 - 2010
Nanosolar, Inc.
  • Led two teams of two in research, design, and construction of metrology instrumentation and a pilot production solar cell manufacturing tool.
  • Mined a data set of 1,000+ manufacturing variables recorded every second.
  • Presented findings to the C-suite executives on a weekly basis.
  • Performed a thermo-mechanical and electrical modeling of solar cell manufacturing processes and devices.
Technologies: JMP, Minitab, LabVIEW, SQL

Federal Election Commission Legal Resources

https://beta.fec.gov/legal-resources/
I am the technical lead driving FEC's new legal search engine.

Rich Dot, Poor Dot

A side project modeling the emergence of inequality in JavaScript and D3.js.

One In a Million

Project calculating how unique a user is based on their demographics and U.S. Census data.

Word Galaxy

The 20,000 most common words in English, spaced by their meaning.

Simply Embed

A SaaS delivering a customization contact form as a service.

Checklistomania

https://github.com/18F/checklistomania
A checklist manager tool offering centrally-managed to-do lists for complex bureaucracies.

Hey Microsoft, the Internet Made My Bot Racist, Too

A viral medium post on the ethics of AI.

Languages

Python, JavaScript, ECMAScript (ES6), SQL, HTML5, C#, HTML, Sass, CSS

Libraries/APIs

Scikit-learn, Node.js, jQuery, REST APIs, React, Handlebars, GitHub API, D3.js, SciPy, NumPy

Tools

GitHub, Slack, Git, Jira, Atom, MATLAB, LabVIEW, JMP, Karma, Travis CI, Babel, Browserify, Sublime Text 3

Storage

MongoDB, SQL Performance, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL

Other

APIs, Mathematical Modeling, Website Performance, Web Scraping, Full-stack, Neural Networks, Minitab, ESLint

Frameworks

Jest, AngularJS, Django, Flask

Paradigms

REST, Continuous Integration (CI), ETL, Model View Controller (MVC), Agile

Platforms

Linux

2010 - 2013

Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering

Columbia University - New York, NY, USA

2002 - 2006

Bachelor of Science in Physics

Yale University - New Haven, CT, USA

Collaboration That Works

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