Résumé

Mikel Mcdaniel

I'm a Software Engineer who practices data science with 10+ years of professional experience. Being a part-time Community College Instructor on the side was a passion project of mine as well. Most of my professional experience is as a Software Engineer at Google, focusing on large-scale storage systems.

Some specific areas I've enjoyed in the past are performance engineering, building statistical models, large-scale systems design, consulting, and software architecture. I'd also love to hear about opportunities in hardware, robotics, research, or anything for a good cause (ending mass incarceration, climate change, and poverty, etc.).

Skills and Environment

• Strong languages: Python, C++
• Comfortable languages: BASH, Java, JavaScript, WebGL (OpenGL ES), Golang
• Version Control: Git, Perforce, SVN
• Frameworks / Other: GitHub, numpy, pandas, OpenCV, Arduino, Linux, Docker, Flask, CSS, WireShark, FlowBlade, gRPC, Protocol Buffers

Education

• Master's Degree, Computer Science -- September 2012 -- May 2013
  Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
  GPA 3.75
• Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science -- August 2009 -- June 2012
  University of California--Davis, Davis, CA
  Completed 4 year degree in 3 years
  GPA 3.45

Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer February 2022 -- Present

OfferUp, Bellevue, WA

• Ads personalization projects leveraging machine learning and statistical methods from proposal through design, implementation, and delegation
• Collaborated with other teams to improve revenue monitoring accuracy by ~10%
• Mentorship and oncall responsibilities

Adjunct Faculty (Computer Science) January 2016 -- June 2022

Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, CA

• Taught Objected Oriented Programming in C++ (3x) and Java (1x)
• Taught Data Structures and Algorithms in C++ (5x)
• Wrote and used GradeOven to automatically grade programming assignments with instant interactive feedback

Volunteer Software Engineer September, 2021 -- January, 2022

Recidiviz, Remote

• Fixed bugs in prison population projection modeling to support projections with multiple legal policies
• Discovered and reported correctness bugs and add unit tests
• Vectorized prison population projection pipeline and reduced wall-clock-time by 20x, using pyinstrument and cProfile to identify bottlenecks

Software Engineer (SRE) July 2013 -- April 2021

Google, Mountain View, CA

• Led SRE orientation for Australia and west-coast USA for 1.5 years
• Built SSD cache analysis pipeline and saved 10's of petabytes of SSD
• Member of oncall team for multi-million QPS/multi-petabyte scale storage systems (Kansas, Sawmill/ULS)
• Consulted for internal Google-internal teams
• Reviewed Practical Alerting chapter of Google SRE Book

Intro to Programming Instructor April -- May 2014

Davis Roots, Davis, CA

• Taught introductory programming to 11 students of various ages, backgrounds, and interests
• Created lessons, homework, and gave 1:1 mentorship

Software Engineer Intern Summer 2012

RapLeaf / LiveRamp, San Francisco, CA

• Consolidated HadoopFS-based stores to conserve space and decrease query times
• Developed Cascading (MapReduce) jobs to build datastores and collect statistics
• Researched experimental techniques for data inference

Software Engineer Intern June 2010 -- June 2011 & Summer 2013

CACE Technologies / Riverbed Technologies, Davis, CA

• Developed and tested software for server-side of a large packet-sniffer
• Designed algorithms for TCP/IP packet data extraction
• Ported open-source software (WireShark)

Personal Projects

• GradeOven
  Single-server web server for compiling and running untrusted student code, with customizable HTML output per assignment submission.
• Completed over 150 ProjectEuler.net problems
  Collection of math and programming challenges, ranging wildy in difficulty. Most problems involve number theory and/or dynamic programming.
• Automated drawing on Sketchful.io Sketchful is a pictionary-type game where players draw a word and others guess. My program took a prompt as input, looked up an image of that prompt, then drew it using Sketchful's limited drawing tools.
• Patched Snes9x, an Open-Source Super Nintendo emulator
  The Super Nintendo draws in 2 to 4 distinct layers; my patch draws each layer with a progressively larger separation in red and blue, giving a 3D effect.
• Simple Compiler in Python
  Written in Python from the ground up, the compiler converts a very simple LiSP-like language to a stack-based assembly languages and then to BrainF***, an esoteric language similar to a Turing Machine.