Lead Back-end Developer
2018 - 2022Marcel For Art Ltd- Built the API from zero and scaled it to 100,000 users.
- Optimized ORM database queries to scale and solve N+1 problems by writing custom Django Managers and using various techniques such as prefetching.
- Wrote a comprehensive set of unit tests and set up CircleCI and coverage reports.
- Set up an infrastructure in the AWS ecosystem using Elastic Beanstalk, RDS, load balancers, and CloudFront and managed deployments to staging and production.
- Wrote an ML-driven artwork feed to deliver a custom-ordered feed to each user.
- Built payment flows for an eCommerce side of the app, allowing the purchase of artwork through Stripe and PayPal.
- Set up caching using Memcached to optimize the app speed.
- Wrote a variety of AWS Lambda functions and Step Functions.
Technologies: Django, Django REST Framework, Amazon Web Services (AWS), PostgreSQL, Python 3, Pytest, AWS RDS, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Memcached, Elasticsearch, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), AWS Simple Notification Service (AWS SNS), Mailchimp, Mandrill, Sentry, Mixpanel, Amplitude, CircleCI, PythonSenior Back-end Developer
2019 - 2020North Shore Automation- Developed middleware for a media asset management system.
- Built media profiles to deliver media assets to large clients such as Comcast.
- Helped build a GraphQL API using MongoDB and Flask.
Technologies: Django, MongoDB, Python 3, Docker, Celery, Flask, REST, GraphQL, PythonBack-end Developer
2018 - 2019Tickerface- Developed the Django REST framework API for a mobile social shopping application.
- Helped showcase the app as the technical representative at Lisbon Web Summit 2018.
- Used scraping techniques in Beautiful Soup to keep prices up-to-date.
- Added social authentication to enable users to sign in with Google and Facebook.
Technologies: Django, Django REST Framework, Diffbot, Elasticsearch, Debian Linux, Ansible, Beautiful Soup, PythonSenior Back-end Developer
2015 - 2018Evo Pricing- Developed a Django UI that allowed visual training of intelligent scraping bots, email alerting, and scheduling scrapes for non-technical users.
- Ran large-scale distributed web scrapes and dealt with ban avoidance techniques such as user-agent and proxy rotation.
- Customized Scrapy and built many custom middlewares, loaders, and pipelines.
- Wrote an API in Django that allowed run scheduling and monitoring.
Technologies: Scrapy, Django, Python 3, Data Wrangling, Data Cleaning, jQuery, Bootstrap, HTML, XPath, CSS Selectors, Django REST Framework, Web Scraping, MySQL, Azure, SQL, Automation, Celery, Selenium, Python, JinjaBack-end Developer
2014 - 2016Dooster- Contributed to developing a new responsive design for the Dooster app.
- Managed the DevOps, such as setting up the Linux server and database.
- Wrote integrations with Google Calendar and Google Contacts.
Technologies: Django, Ajax, jQuery, HTML, CSS, Python, JinjaBack-end Developer
2014 - 2015Clandestine Brewing- Used metrics via Graphite to show probe graphs of cold room temperature of beer in a custom Django admin.
- Integrated with Facebook to show the latest posts on the website.
- Redesigned the entire site from scratch to give a more responsive and fresher look.
- Integrated with Google Calendar API to show the latest brewery events on the homepage.
Technologies: Heroku, Django, Graphite, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Django Extension & Middleware, Ajax, Facebook SDK, PostgreSQL, Python, JinjaBack-end Developer
2014 - 2014Oddsbot- Built spiders to gather data from over 50 bookmakers and betting exchanges in the UK.
- Presented arbitrage opportunities to subscribers using a Django-driven website.
- Developed an email alerts system to alert subscribers of premium arbitrage opportunities.
Technologies: Django, Scrapy, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, Python, Jinja
Lee Hodgkinson
Back-end Developer in Liverpool, United Kingdom
Member since September 7, 2022
Lee is a senior back-end developer with eight years of experience working for various startups. He has a PhD in physics and received a prestigious EPSRC prize. He specializes in writing scalable, well-tested, production-ready, and clean pythonic code as an expert in the Python ecosystem and its various libraries and frameworks. Lee is proficient in machine learning, TensorFlow, PyTorch, NumPy, pandas, and scikit-learn, and writing large-scale web scrapers and ETL pipelines.
Lee is now available for hire
Portfolio
- Marcel For Art LtdDjango, Django REST Framework, Amazon Web Services (AWS), PostgreSQL...
- North Shore AutomationDjango, MongoDB, Python 3, Docker, Celery, Flask, REST, GraphQL, Python
- TickerfaceDjango, Django REST Framework, Diffbot, Elasticsearch, Debian Linux, Ansible...
Experience
- Statistics 10 years
- Python 3 8 years
- Django 8 years
- Django REST Framework 6 years
- PostgreSQL 4 years
- Pytest 3 years
- Deep Learning 3 years
- TensorFlow 3 years
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
Django, Django REST Framework, PostgreSQL, TensorFlow, Pandas, Docker, Machine Learning, A/B Testing, MongoDB, Unit Testing, Python
The most amazing...
...thing I've written is a numerical simulation of a black hole, with results published in well-renowned journals and presented at international conferences.
Employment
Experience
- iOS App for Artists and Art Lovershttps://marcel-art.my.canva.site/
A fully mobile, artist-driven app for running a creative business.
I was the lead back-end developer for over four years. I wrote the REST API in Django, managed cloud DevOps in AWS, and built an ML-powered curated feed, and payment gateways for a shop. - Mobile Social-shopping iOS Applicationhttps://logicon.io/project/tickerface/
Developed the DRF API for a mobile social-shopping iOS application and helped showcase it in Lisbon WebSummit 2018.
In this project, I have done the following:
• Used most aspects of DRF
• Communication with Slack
• Agile workflow Trello
• DevOps using Ansible and general Debian sysadmin
• Scraping using Diffbot and BeautifulSoup
• ElasticSearch
• Social integration with Allauth - Evopricing: Large-scale Distributed Scrapinghttps://evopricing.com/
I developed a smart Scrapy spider that was trainable via a Django web GUI. This work was completed mostly alone, but at times I took the role of lead developer, trained a team of junior contracted developers, collaborated via Git, and performed code reviews.
This project allows a semi-technical user (XPATH knowledge) to configure the spider for different target sites and schedule periodic runs.
In this role, I dealt with many challenges, such as:
• Prototyping and figuring out the initial architecture.
• Ban avoidance with custom proxy-rotation and user-agent rotation middleware.
• Data integrity and cleaning.
• Writing an API in DRF allowing front-end run-scheduling and monitoring.
• Distributing scrapes.
• Provisioning servers from scratch.
• Writing custom loaders, extensions, middleware, and pipelines.
The distributed scrapes involved recursive algorithms that pushed scraping jobs into a central Redis queue for a bunch of celery workers to pick off and do in parallel.
Skills
Languages
Python 3, Python, C++, C, Kotlin, GraphQL, HTML, XPath, SQL, CSS, JavaScript, CSS3Frameworks
Django, Django REST Framework, Jinja, Flask, Scrapy, Bootstrap, Selenium, OAuth 2Libraries/APIs
Pandas, NumPy, TensorFlow, PyTorch, LSTM, Zipline, jQuery, Diffbot, Beautiful Soup, Facebook SDK, Stripe, Mandrill APITools
Pytest, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), AWS Simple Notification Service (AWS SNS), CircleCI, Mailchimp, Sentry, Mathematica, MATLAB, You Only Look Once (YOLO), Celery, Ansible, AWS Step Functions, Beanstalk, AWS SESParadigms
Unit Testing, ETL, Siamese Neural Networks, REST, Automation, AgilePlatforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Mandrill, Mixpanel, Linux, Android, Docker, Azure, Debian Linux, Heroku, Jupyter Notebook, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2Storage
PostgreSQL, Memcached, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, MySQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), RedisOther
Statistics, Physics, A/B Testing, Singular Value Decomposition, Matrix Algebra, Data Wrangling, Long Short-term Memory (LSTM), Linear Regression, Bayesian Inference & Modeling, LSTM Networks, Convolutional Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Neural Networks, Neural Networks, Hypothesis Testing, Recommendation Systems, Amplitude, Bayesian Statistics, Modeling, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Mathematics, Monte Carlo Simulations, Numerical Methods, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Backtesting Trading Strategies, Convex Optimization, Generalized Linear Model (GLM), Deep Learning, Regression, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), K-nearest Neighbors, AWS RDS, Data Cleaning, CSS Selectors, Web Scraping, Graphite, Django Extension & Middleware, Ajax, Cloudinary, Code Review, Data, APIs, Reverse Engineering, Tornado, Distributed Systems
Education
- PhD in Physics2009 - 2013University of Nottingham - Nottingham, United Kingdom
- Master's Degree in Physics2003 - 2007University of Manchester - Manchester, United Kingdom
Certifications
- MIT Fundamentals of StatisticsAUGUST 2021 - PRESENTedX
- Android Kotlin Developer NanodegreeJUNE 2021 - PRESENTUdacity
- Data Scientist NanodegreeFEBRUARY 2021 - PRESENTUdacity
- Artificial Intelligence for Trading NanodegreeOCTOBER 2020 - PRESENTUdacity
- TensorFlow in Practice SpecializationAPRIL 2020 - PRESENTCoursera
- Deep Learning SpecializationJANUARY 2020 - PRESENTCoursera
- Machine LearningJULY 2019 - PRESENTCoursera
