George London, Developer in San Francisco, CA, United States
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George London

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Recommendation Systems Developer

Location
San Francisco, CA, United States
Toptal Member Since
August 16, 2015

George is a developer and data scientist who enjoys turning raw information into insight. He is comfortable at every level of the stack. George builds robust pipelines to extract, clean, transform, and load data and then performs statistical analysis to build accurate machine learning models. On top of this, George also develops complete, stable, scalable websites, mobile apps, and data visualizations that deliver a great experience to users.

Recommendation SystemsPythonDjangoPyCharmPandasPostgreSQLLinuxSQLElasticsearchCeleryDjango REST FrameworkNoSQLHadoopFabricFlask

Portfolio

Omni Timeline
Swift, Objective-C, Django REST Framework, Django
Finance Matters
Django
Sonica
Heroku, Swift, Objective-C, Scrapy, Django, StarCluster, Python

Experience

PostgreSQL - 4 yearsPython - 4 yearsDjango - 4 yearsElasticsearch - 3 yearsRecommendation Systems - 3 yearsDjango REST Framework - 2 yearsHadoop - 2 yearsSwift - 1 year

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Git, Xcode, Eclipse, IPython Notebook, PyCharm

The most amazing...

...thing I've built is an app that uses my novel algorithm to recommend electronic music that's personalized to an individual's tastes, mood, and activity.

Work Experience

Contract Web/Mobile Developer

2015 - PRESENT
Omni Timeline
  • Was brought on to rescue a server-side API project that had been badly mishandled by prior contractors.
  • Added full test coverage to the API, exposing numerous errors and security risks.
  • Developed a suite of new API features to allow searching, filtering, and file uploads through Django Rest Framework.
  • Collaborated with an existing client-side mobile developer to release a new, stable version of the app.
  • Built a new, doctors-only version of the app in Swift.
Technologies: Swift, Objective-C, Django REST Framework, Django

Contract Python/Web Developer

2015 - PRESENT
Finance Matters
  • Converted an extensive Excel model of dairy farm financial performance into a robust Python model.
  • Helped the client think through and design a website to allow farmers to apply the model to their own data.
  • Built wireframes laying out the ideal website.
  • Built a Django web app allowing smooth handling of highly interdependent time-series data.
  • Searched for and hired a graphic designer for the project.
  • Built very extensive unit, integration, and behavioral tests to verify the consistently correct behavior of the system.
Technologies: Django

Founder

2014 - PRESENT
Sonica
  • Conceived and designed an app that recommends electronic music that's perfectly tuned to the user's individual tastes and current mood and activity.
  • Built a server-side API using Django (with libraries such as Django-REST-Framework, NLTK, celery, AllAuth, numpy, scipy, pandas, psycopg2 and gevent.).
  • Researched and developed a novel matrix factorization-based recommendation algorithm using iPython Notebook, StarCluster, Elasticsearch, igraph, ANNoy, scikit-learn, graphlab-create, Scrapy, and MOE.
  • Developed and released an iPhone client using both Swift and Objective-C.
  • Hosted infrastructure on Heroku and Amazon EC2 using Postgres and Redis.
Technologies: Heroku, Swift, Objective-C, Scrapy, Django, StarCluster, Python

Contract Devops Developer

2014 - 2015
Polestar Pilates
  • Used the methods in my Django deployment guide to deploy a production Django server.
  • Coached the client through the process of learning to administer and maintain his own site.
  • Set up a best-practices logging configuration.
  • Set up an integration with Google+ services.
  • Jumped in to debug numerous ad hoc issues in the client's homebrewed code.
Technologies: Fabric, Chef, Django

Founder

2011 - 2014
LinerNotes
  • Came up with the idea for a website that gathered all the rich context and metadata surrounding music in one easy-to-read place.
  • Designed and developed the entire website from scratch in Django. Developed both the back-end and the front-end.
  • Built a robust ETL pipeline using Hadoop and Cascading to extract metadata from 7 different sources and merge it all into a well-reconciled data model.
  • Developed a deployment automation process that uses Chef and Fabric to let me provision and deploy new nodes with a single line of code.
  • Deployed an Elasticsearch cluster with robust custom tokenizers so that users could get sensible results whether or not they used the correct character sets while typing artist names like "Mötley Crüe."
Technologies: Elasticsearch, HBase, Hadoop, RDF, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, Django, Python

Investment Associate

2008 - 2011
Bridgewater Associates
  • Performed financial and macroeconomic research for the world's largest hedge fund.
  • Managed 8 interns, including two Harvard MBAs.
  • Built a comprehensive model to predict the impact of government spending on economic growth in the developed world.
  • Wrote widely-ready newsletters about U.S. industrial production and the Australian Economy.
  • Automated a process for extracting and computing key fiscal data from world governments.
Technologies: Visual Basic, Microsoft Excel

Sonica

Sonica is a mobile app that recommends electronic music that's perfectly tuned for what you're doing and feeling. It's written in Objective-C and Swift and uses a completely hand-written, proprietary recommendation algorithm.

The Idiomatic Guide to Deploying Django in Production

http://rogueleaderr.com/post/65157477648/the-idiomatic-guide-to-deploying-django-in
A comprehensive guide I wrote to deploying Django sites in production on Amazon Web Services using Fabric and Chef.

As of this writing, it's the highest ranking site in Google for "Django Deployment" that isn't written by the official Django team.

The A* Interviews

http://rogueleaderr.com/post/65626420761/introducing-the-a-interviews
A series of podcasts I've done with some of the most skilled programmers on the planet, including the #1 all-time reputation leader on Stack Overflow.

Languages

Python, RDF, JavaScript, SQL, Visual Basic, Objective-C, Java, Swift

Frameworks

Django, Django REST Framework, GraphLab, Hadoop, Scrapy, Flask, AngularJS

Libraries/APIs

Pandas, Scikit-learn, Fabric, Gevent

Tools

PyCharm, IPython Notebook, Celery, Xcode, Git, Microsoft Excel, StarCluster, OpenLink Virtuoso, Chef

Other

Recommendation Systems, Software Development, Cascading

Platforms

Linux, Eclipse, Heroku, iOS

Storage

Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, NoSQL, HBase

2004 - 2008

Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy and Psychology

Yale University - New Haven, Connecticut

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