Marcus McCurdy
Verified Expert in Engineering
Python Developer
Philadelphia, PA, United States
Toptal member since December 22, 2014
Marcus has a bachelor's in computer engineering and a master's in computer science. He is a talented programmer and excels most at back-end development, but he is perfectly comfortable creating polished products as a full-stack developer as well.
Portfolio
Experience
- Java - 10 years
- SQL - 10 years
- JavaScript - 6 years
- MySQL - 6 years
- Flask - 5 years
- Python - 5 years
- Ansible - 4 years
- PHP - 2 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Vagrant, Git, Vim Text Editor, IntelliJ IDEA, OS X
The most amazing...
...thing I've coded is a multithreaded log aggregation platform that processes terabytes of data daily on a single machine.
Work Experience
Lead Software Engineer
50onRed
- Updated an existing serial web scraping process to a parallel asynchronous process using Python's RQ library. Reduced processing time by 500%.
- Provisioned, maintained, and utilized a 5 node Elasticsearch cluster being fed by LogStash.
- Deployed StatsD to several web apps, providing key metrics and insight.
- Used OpenResty and LUA to aggregate ping stats into Redis and flush the stats into MySQL. Reduced the delay in calculation of statistics from one hour to five minutes.
- Created a Flask back-end for an automatic updating application processing millions of requests daily on only two servers.
- Created Ansible playbooks for deploying web applications to EC2.
- Designed MySQL partitioning and indexing schemes for tables with hundreds of millions of rows.
- Created an AngularJS app to manage ad placements.
Software Engineer
Swizly
- Monitored and analyzed RabbitMQ queue growth patterns in order to hunt down performance issues.
- Inspected Celery events, workers, and tasks to discovery why workers would hang forever.
- Scrutinized Python Celery job code to find locations in that could cause a job process to hang forever.
- Update Celery job configuration to set hard timeouts on jobs that never finish.
- Investigated why exceptions in Celery jobs were not being sent to the Sentry server.
Research Engineer
Drexel University
- Created a Java Swing geospatial command and control application for US Army experiments.
- Utilized multicast networking to create a distributed document sharing and editing platform.
- Added continuous integration to the project by provisioning and deploying a Jenkins server.
- Set up and utilized a Sonatype Nexus Maven repository server for our internal Maven repositories.
- Built a custom graphics library of military symbols on top of NASA's WorldWind library.
Combat System Engineer
Naval Surface Warfare Center
- Created test and evaluation plans for combat systems.
- Was responsible for the installation and configuration of remote assistance systems on US Navy cruisers and destroyers. Saved time and money with the remote system by allowing shore-based experts to provide remote support to sailors both at sea and when docked. Resulted in a dramatic cost savings and decreased the turn around time for repairs.
- Trained sailors in the usage of the remote support system.
- Tested and repaired ship-based FDDI networks.
- Worked directly with a System Test Officer (STO) to ensure minimal or no downtime while installing routers and software for remote support.
Experience
Doge Pricer
https://github.com/volker48/dogepricerFlask-mandrill
https://github.com/volker48/flask-mandrillItsdangerous
https://rubygems.org/gems/itsdangerousrNamegen
C2k
https://github.com/volker48/c2kMachine Learning Foundations: A Case Study Approach
https://www.coursera.org/account/accomplishments/verify/HURTYF3Q79RVPush It Real Good
https://github.com/volker48/pushitrealgoodKaggle Monsters Contest Code
https://github.com/volker48/monstersEducation
Master's Degree in Computer Science
Drexel University - Pennsylvania, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
California State University at Long Beach - California, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
SQLAlchemy, Beautiful Soup, Python-rq, Scikit-learn, NumPy, Pandas, Facebook API, Mandrill API, jQuery
Tools
Vagrant, Ansible, Vim Text Editor, Git, IntelliJ IDEA, Celery, RabbitMQ, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS ELB, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), NPM, Apache Maven, Mercurial, Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Zsh, Apache Ant, VirtualBox, Jenkins, NGINX, Java Concurrency, IPython Notebook
Languages
Python, C#, Go, Java, PHP, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, C++, Less, CSS, Bash Script, Bash
Frameworks
Flask, Swing, Django, Bootstrap, Laravel, Bootstrap 3, AngularJS
Paradigms
DevOps, Test-driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), Agile Software Development, Concurrent Programming
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), MacOS, Amazon EC2, Linux, Windows, OS X, Docker, Ubuntu Linux, Mailgun, WordPress
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MySQL, Redis, Redshift, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL
Other
Software Development, Ajax, Multiprocessing, Multithreading, Multicast, SSH, VNC, Relational Database Services (RDS)
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring