Ken Mendes
Verified Expert in Engineering
FastAPI Developer
Antwerp, Belgium
Toptal member since August 16, 2019
Ken is a full-stack Python developer who has broad experience in different IT roles, including mission-critical operations. He enjoys challenges, algorithms, and distributed systems, and follows a university education in data science and artificial intelligence. Ken cherishes knowledge, responsibility, and integrity, and brings these qualities to all his jobs.
Portfolio
Experience
- Linux - 15 years
- SQL - 15 years
- Python 3 - 7 years
- PostgreSQL - 5 years
- JavaScript - 5 years
- Flask - 3 years
- FastAPI - 2 years
- React - 1 year
Availability
Preferred Environment
Git, Linux
The most amazing...
...thing I've written in Python is a fully-functional C compiler.
Work Experience
Freelance
Muresi
- Built eCommerce websites, including the development of custom plugins for communicating with payment gateways and shipping handlers.
- Developed a flexible and automatic billing system in Python for online marketeers. It interfaced with bookkeeping systems and online marketing platforms like AdWords.
- Built an ecologically inspired social web application using Python, Flask, and React.
- Developed a popular PrestaShop plugin in PHP that dynamically injects canonical and hreflang tags.
- Built a proof-of-concept neural network for license plate recognition using Python and Keras.
IT Lecturer
KdG University College
- Taught Linux courses focused on platform basics, philosophy, commands, regular expressions, and Shell scripting.
- Guided students through the Cisco CCNA courses with theory, labs and thesis.
- Taught basic and advanced networking courses.
- Helped adapt course content to the current business context.
- Built network simulations in order to evaluate students' skills and knowledge.
HR Business Partner for IT and Americas
SWIFT
- Attracted and recruited new IT talent to the organisation.
- Guided performance management cycles in the supported divisions.
- Supported senior management with facilitation, coaching, and management training.
- Encouraged and supported a culture of continuous improvement.
- Designed talent programs and training packages.
Senior Unix Engineer
SWIFT
- Led the technical team for one of the internal HP-UX teams.
- Responsible for the internal mission-critical services running on HP-UX Serviceguard clusters and Oracle RDBMS.
- Wrote business continuity tests and planning.
- Created post-mortem reports detailing operational incidents.
- Ensured all managed systems met or exceeded the required security levels and policies.
Unix and Network engineer
Reslea NV
- Responsible for the mission-critical HP-UX (Serviceguard) clusters.
- Built and managed a pan-European network between the headquarters and branch offices.
- Created a highly-available Citrix infrastructure for business-critical applications.
- Implemented server virtualisation using VMWare ESX Server.
- Built a VPN solution that allowed secure remote working.
IT Coordinator
KOCA
- Responsible for the management of the IT infrastructure, networks, and telephone exchanges.
- Supervised two IT colleagues.
- Created a Drupal-based website for the organisation.
- Planned structured cabling as well as network and voice architecture for several new buildings.
- Devised a buying and replacement strategy for all IT equipment.
Experience
Near Duplicate Image Detection Using Locality Sensitive Hashing
https://github.com/mendesk/image-ndd-lshEducation
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
University of Antwerp - Antwerp, Belgium
Bachelor's Degree in Applied Computer Science
KdG University College - Antwerp, Belgium
Skills
Libraries/APIs
React, X (formerly Twitter) API, Google Ads API, Mapbox GL, NumPy, SciPy, Scikit-learn, Pandas, Keras, Formik
Tools
Shell, VMware, Docker Hub, Git, LaTeX
Languages
Python 3, SQL, HTML, Bash, Python, HTML5, PHP, C, JavaScript, C++, CSS
Platforms
Linux, Debian, Google Ads, HP-UX, Citrix, Java EE, Oracle, SharePoint, Docker, Kubernetes, Alpine Linux, Unix
Frameworks
Flask, Bootstrap
Paradigms
Microservices, Database Design
Storage
PostgreSQL, Databases, Oracle RDBMS, RDBMS, MySQL
Other
FastAPI, Networks, Data Science, Cisco, Juniper, Shell Scripting, SAP, Networking, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning
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