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Achievements

Achievement: YOLOAchievement: Pull Sharkx2Achievement: Arctic Code Vault ContributorAchievement: Starstruck

Achievements

Achievement: YOLOAchievement: Pull Sharkx2Achievement: Arctic Code Vault ContributorAchievement: Starstruck

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anthonywu/README.md

About Me

For over 20 years, everything I touch at work, I ship!

  • Early career: Eng at YouTube during early scale up years at Google.
  • Co-Founder and CTO at LearnSprout, a Python data company acquired by Apple in 2016.
  • 4+ years embedded with an org of math/physics PhDs helping with their software and infrastructure.

With a strong belief in action begets information and always working with a sense of urgency, I help my teams compete and win.

My engineering philosophy is centered around agility: plan and execute in short cycles of hours or days.

With rapid iteration and feedback loops, I help small and young teams minimize "worked on the wrong thing" risk.

Currently

  • 🏝️ Enjoying a sabbatical from full time work after continuously working since 2004
  • ✈️ Based in San Francisco, but frequently traveling
  • πŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’» Contributing to OSS after a ~9 year OSS hiatus due to working at ο£Ώ Big Fruit Inc
  • ✨ Evaluating every AI-assisted CLI and IDE available to find their strengths
  • 🌟 Frequently starring, cloning, and contributing to repos w/Python, GenAI, LLM and Local-First software stacks

Open to Opportunities

  • 🀝🏼 Advisory: Hourly fee. Video or SF in-person. Technical due diligence, architecture/code reviews, eng team building/hiring
  • πŸ’Ό Consulting: Project-based pricing. Python/AI app architecture, AI/ML workflow
  • πŸ› οΈ Fractional Engineer: Early-stage startups needing technical leadership
  • 🏒 Full Time: Only considering extremely good fits. Happy to explore.
  • πŸš€ Co-Founder Opportunities: Also seeking only extremely good fits. If we have mutuals, lets chat!

Ideal Projects

  • πŸ‘¨πŸΌβ€πŸ« Video or on-site training, limited scope and time engagement.
  • πŸ—οΈ Startups needing fractional CTO/VPE leadership, i.e. bootstrap good practices into engineering cultures
  • πŸ”§ Companies modernizing infrastructure, i.e. upgrade runtimes, packaging and deploying into cloud services
  • πŸš€ Teams building GenAI/LLM applications, i.e. technology selection, planning and scoping

πŸ“« DM @ X Messages or LinkedIn

πŸ† Notable Achievements

  • Co-Founder/CTO of LearnSprout – Startup with Successful Exit: Acquired by Apple in 2015
    • all team members hired
    • transfered tech into production, no re-writes
  • πŸ“š Apple Education Software: If your children uses Apple in Education, you are using software that originated from my house.
  • πŸ—ΊοΈ Apple Maps: If you think Apple Maps has gotten better since 2019, I helped.
  • 🐍 Python Champion: Championed Python as first-class programming language at Apple (2015-2024).
  • πŸ“Ί YouTube: Engineered compliance systems. Earning Google OC Award for technical work relating to Viacom v. YouTube

Brief History of Work

βŒ›οΈ πŸ“„ ➑ click each item to expand details
2019-2024
ο£Ώ Apple, Software Engineer, Staff / ICT5
  • Role: Lone SWE reporting to a Data Science org. Bridged the notebook/sql β†’ ops chasm between data exploration and production. Helped shape rotators ship their analysis as the $f'(t)$ to their $f(t)$.
  • Impact: Supported a big org of Apple Maps Eval Data Scientists with my experience in building app/services, owning end-to-end dev-ops and production.
  • Tools: Solved problems and automated workflows with: Git CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, Spark, Hadoop, Python 3, pandas, Jupyter and a wide variety of tools from the Python data ecosystem.
  • Ownership: Creator of one of the most widely used and fully featured notebook services at Apple (competed with centralized company-wide service).
  • Side quest: Make Python Good at Apple. Active member of community in company-wide Python chat rooms and helped maintain company-wide CI builders and cloud integration for Python Setuptools, Poetry and Hatch builders.
2015-2019
ο£Ώ Apple, Software Engineer, Staff / ICT5
  • Role: Founding Engineer + Principal of project.
  • Performance Management: πŸŒ… and πŸ™, coding, mentoring, hiring and keeping a happy team that delivered.
  • Cloud Migration: Lifted/migrated acquired AWS Linux/Python tech stack into Apple internal data centers.
  • Speed: Re-launched publicly in first year. Navigated Apple culture and organizations.
  • Recognition: Promoted to SWE ICT5.
  • Product Scope: My team launched and supports:
  • Unintended side quest: Helped define requirements for hosting Python a first class language at Apple - which, until then, required high friction for hosting cloud-native and full-stack Python apps in a sea of Objective C, and On Premise Enterprise Java.
2011-2015
🌱 LearnSprout, Co-Founder & CTO
  • LearnSprout was an education technology company that provided recommendations and analysis on student data. Our products were used by thousands of K-12 schools globally.
  • Investors, Mentors & Supporters: Formation8 / a16z/ Samsung Ventures / ImagineK12 Winter 2012 / Code for America Accelerator Summer 2012 / Wharton Social Venture Fund: 2013
  • Personal Growth: building this company, I at least 5X'ed my technical scope of knowledge since leaving Google
  • Full Stack Ownership: IC and tech lead on Python app stack of nginx, uwsgi, flask/bottle, celery, requests lib and many others
  • Hiring/Mentoring: hired and personally onboarded new and recent college graduates
  • Engineering Productivity: reproducible dev and prod envs with Docker & Hashicorp Terraform/Packer/Vagrant. Used VM, LXC and Docker-based developer sandboxes and containers
  • Cloud Vendors: deployed on AWS & Rackspace, used IaaS, PaaS, cloud functions and static-site deployment strategies
  • AWS: extensive use of AWS EC2, VPC, S3, SNS, SQS, RDS, ElastiCache, IAM, CodeDeploy
  • Security: set up security namespaces for apps and envs with well-scoped IAM users/roles and policies
  • SRE: set up SSL/HTTPS certs, gateways and reverse proxies using AWS Route53, CloudFlare, various registrars
  • SysAdmin: built and deployed apps across Debian and RedHat variants of Linux, but particularly fond of Ubuntu distro
  • Frontend: evolving variety of contemporary frontend workflows, inclusive of JS, CoffeeScript, ES6, Webpack, and npm
  • Debugging: client-side debugging with Firebug, Chrome DevTools, Postman and pass through proxies towards RESTful API backend
  • Databases: MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB
  • Analytics: tweaked analytics backend with query optimization and stored procedures
  • CI/CD Automation: automated testing in git-flow pipelines
  • Browser Agents and Automation: html/csv/json/xml text processing with BeautifulSoup, lxml, csvkit, etc
  • Observability: integrated with SaaS products in logging, app metrics, and dev-ops monitoring (e.g. NewRelic, PagerDuty)
  • Pager Duty: owned or participated in all other kinds of dev-ops grunt work
  • Founder-glamour work: kitchen cleaning and trash duty
2008-2011
▢️ YouTube / Google, Software Engineer Tech Lead
  • Role: My dev work was roughly 80% backend, 20% frontend, along with Tech Lead (TL) responsibilities for other engineers, interns, and remote (Ukraine) contractors. While not writing code:
    • Design & code reviews (Tech Lead of 3-8 member eng teams, 2010-2011)
    • Participate in project planning and prioritization re: content policies and enforcement
    • Hosting & mentoring engineering interns, all joining as FTE after internship
    • Misc Big Company duties (interviews, etc)
  • Ownership: Eng DRI for large swaths of the workflows for enforcing terms of service and legal compliance - interacting directly with YouTube General Counsel. I created tools that are used by human and machine reviewers to keep up with the stream of user reports, with the goal of maximizing decision accuracy.
  • Tech: Frontend + backend application development on LAMP stack (Linux, MySQL, Python) and internal Google infrastructure. Wrote code at every layer:
    • Shell scripts (deployment, monitoring, analytics)
    • MySQL & Google Bigtable (schema creation, query optimizations, on-demand queries)
    • Workflows for automated and human review
    • Servlets & Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX/JSON, Firebug
  • Recognitiom: Google OC Award for performing engineering due diligence relating to Viacom v. YouTube Inc.
2005-2008
Varolii, Software Engineer, Services / Forward Deployment, company later acquired by Nuance then Microsoft
  • Role: Served as Software Engineer and Solutions Architect for major enterprise accounts on the Professional Services team. Primarily responsible for design, implementation, release, and post-production support. Sometimes I follow the sales reps on trips as engineering representative so I can go listen to potential and whale customers about what they really want.
  • Tech: Built client-facing integrations for clients in {pharmacy, banking, insurance, utility} industries, with Java, Oracle, Solaris, IBM and also open source technologies. Complete ownership to build, test, and release to production. Provide and defend cost and effort work order estimates to clients.
  • Pager Duty: Serve as production support escalation contact.
  • Remote collaboration: Provided technical and project training to paired offshore development team (visited team in Bangalore)
  • Moment of Clarity: Spent too much time of my life doing custom work, vowed to never suffer custom work ever again. Platform-everything, API-everything, modularize and share all the reasonable things from this point on.
2004-2005
Intel, Software Engineer Intern
  • Duration: 6 month co-op
  • Role: Primary application front-end developer for internal tool that tracks project dependencies for hardware in the R&D pipeline. From initial conception to product marketing, this tool allows all internal participants of projects to have a bird's eye view of progression.
  • Platform: Windows, Visual Studio, .NET, C#
  • Moment of Clarity: In hindsight, we were re-inventing Excel.

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