A few comments from my manager:MacKinley routinely exceeds my expectations of a Staff Engineer due to the level of completeness and quality of his work, but perhaps more indicative is his judgement in how and where he spends his time. With little guidance from myself or his team lead, Mack has repeatedly determined that a less important task is in fact much higher priority than it seems. He escalates these to our Product Owner and/or myself, makes a compelling case for why it should be prioritized and then executes. This stands out among our other more senior Staff Engineers.He is also unusually ROI and customer focused which play in to his judgement. Mac is also often the first of our engineers to adopt new best practices and integrate those into his process which becomes a role model for the other engineers – he’s a trail-blazer.

At the end of last year, GoSpotCheck was sold to a private equity firm and merged with one of their existing assets, WorldApp Inc. Many of my coworkers chose to leave, including our only ML/CV specialist, which presented a unique opportunity for me to help my company recover control of its intellectual property and also to gain rapid exposure to the world of computer vision.Accomplishments include:- Inherited a Tensorflow 1.16 project with no documentation or context to speak of. Upgraded it to Tensorflow 2.6 and created extensive technical documentation that proved instrumental in the onboarding of several new team members.- Migrated training infrastructure from Google AI Platform to Google Kubernetes Engine, resulting in a ~1.5x increase in speed, ~2x cost savings, and access to hardware that was previously unavailable to us (this is an important precursor to the next point).- Replaced our expensive and underutilized multi-GPU distribution strategy with a TPU setup, which required rearchitecting the data pipeline into a much more performant cloud storage streaming system with parallel reads against TFRecord files. When the dust settled we were looking at a hardware accelerator expenditure of ~$56/week, down from $982/week.A few comments from my manager on my most recent performance review:- "MacKinley is always seeking out new and improved techniques to the problems at hand. He is eager to try new things and frequently takes the initiative to improve situations without waiting for explicit instructions to do so."- "MacKinley is highly accountable for his work and actions. He consistently learns from his mistakes and uses them as opportunities to improve." "MacKinley is an excellent engineer and excels at problem solving. He knows how to use technology effectively and is always looking for new tech to better address problems. He has greatly improved his communication style in the past couple of years and is a highly valued and trusted member of the team."

Accomplishments include:Created an image annotation tool from scratch that farms out human annotation tasks to a pool of workers.Assisted with architectural upgrades to an aging pipeline for human tagging to facilitate automated tagging via computer vision. Built a customer facing tool for viewing the results of our image recognition pipeline.Built a REST API to ingest and store customer product information, indexing it in ElasticSearch.

When GoSpotCheck made the decision to divide the engineering department into silos, I first landed on the Account Management team, responsible for the maintenance of the customer-facing admin dashboard portion of the company's web offering. I worked mainly on addressing performance problems in our backend systems, gradually transitioning the frontend to React, and responding to bug tickets.

When I joined GoSpotCheck, there were no teams. The ten engineers were randomly assigned a partner to pair program with each day, which allowed me to get exposure with our web dashboard, our mobile apps, our backend services, and our bespoke solutions for specific customers.

Developed a social network infused with an online marketplace for buying and selling pieces of artwork.

Developed a democratic music ratings system based on faux stock market mechanics with social networking features.

Designed, developed and maintained a new website and web-based catalog system.

Developed and maintained a collection of websites that sell tickets and provide checkin services for the various boats operated by the company.

Worked as an independent contractor for several companies including Lockwood Media Group, Digital Printing & Graphics, Phi Kappa Psi of MSU, and more.

Contributed web and mobile application programming on about thirty separate projects.

Designed and developed a website to share and network events on college campuses.

Designed and developed a web-based Video on Demand (VOD) system entirely by myself. Later, designed and developed a live streaming video recording mechanism which uploaded 1080p video into the VOD system over wireless networks using Adobe Flash Media Server.

Developed a network of Content Distribution websites for the WiyaNetwork. Various technical support tasks and server administration.