peter william kong

contact: / 208.596.5557

web: peterkong.com / github: happythenewsad

location: USA

 
experience

Senior Software Engineer at Quill.org November 2020 - present

  • Develops and maintains large web property (quill.org, 40k+ requests per minute) that has helped 5 million+ students learn how to write.
  • Lead maintainer and advocate of Quill's Postman instance. Writes, maintains, and documents hundreds of API requests/contracts/schemata to various services.
  • Responsible for machine learning operations and pipelines, employing AWS, Python, Airbyte, spaCy, and other technologies.
  • Responsible for addressing scaling issues with code refactoring, CI/CD tuning, and database optimization.

Freelance software engineering, tech writing, and business writing consultant May 2020 - present

Senior Software Engineer at Aptible, Inc. (YCombinator S14) May 2019 - May 2020

  • Built Aptible's core platform with React, Ruby on Rails, and other technologies.

Research Assistant at UPenn May 2017 - July 2017

  • Designed and built a distributed event aggregation and analytics system for PHAST, an adaptive network intrusion detection system, under direction of Prof. Jonathan M. Smith
  • User onboarding and 'how to' documentation was "the best ever encountered in the lab", according to a PHD then-candidate.

Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg LP May 2012 - May 2016

  • Led and executed cutting edge ad products for Bloomberg.com (example)
  • Implemented Bloomberg.com’s first comprehensive native ad solution
  • Documented numerous mission-critical APIs, using tools like Swagger, Postman, CLI printouts (e.g. --help), and old fashioned READMEs.
  • Led and executed effort to transition all of Bloomberg.com's video experiences from a third-party video solution to an in-house, open source, HTML5/Flash video player. Following this effort Bloomberg became Comscore's top-ranked video news source (Business and Finance category)
  • Designed and implemented an asynchronous task system responsible for ingesting all news, video, and real-time stock data into Bloomberg.com

Software Engineer at LMN Solutions July 2010 - May 2012

  • Developed an ETL framework with Ruby and Java for The Boeing Company.
  • Detected team-wide inefficiencies in integration testing, wrote a specialized RSpec API to simplify the process, presented the API with code examples to over 50 developers and managers, introducing significant time savings and higher testing standards.
  • Directed the LMN 2011 Intern Program
education

University of Pennsylvania graduated December 2018

  • Master of Science in Engineering, Computer & Information Science
  • Machine learning coursework: Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, Independent Study (NLP)

Georgetown University

  • B.A. Computer Science, Minor: English, Chinese
projects
Evaluating Style Transfer original NLP research on linguistic style transfer, advised by Prof. Chris Callison-Burch
Jack A Blackjack game simulator
Spooky Author Identification A Kaggle competition notebook and writeup
Minimum Viable Git A Git workshop I created and presented at the Penn Data Science Group, Fall 2018
training & certifications
  • Apache Hadoop Certified Developer – Cloudera: New York, NY
  • Certified Scrum Master – Scrum Alliance: Reston, VA
  • Advanced Ruby – Pragmatic Studio: Reston, VA
  • Certificate of Completion, Data Science - General Assembly, New York
tech skills
  • Tech writing: Swagger, Postman, CLI syntax print statements, Jira, plain text files
  • Machine Learning: Numpy, scikit-learn, pandas, TensorFlow
  • Languages and markup: Python, JavaScript, Ruby, C++, HTML, CSS, XML, etc
  • Datastores: Spark, Kafka, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL
  • Tools/Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Git, Amazon AWS, Heroku, Apache, and much more
  • Systems: OS X, Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat)

Words

  • Studied creative fiction under Jennifer Fink, 2010 Pulitzer Prize nominee
  • Student correspondent for The Hoya, Georgetown campus newspaper
  • Writing samples (academic, editorial, creative) available upon request
  • Conversational Japanese and Chinese, completed Columbia University in Beijing program (Summer 2008)