Built, maintained, and operated the serverless platform hosting the Netflix device API at the edge.

Projects:* Storj - Heroku Addon: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/storj* Storj - Storj.js: https://github.com/storj/storj.js

Named Heroku Add-on of the Month February 2017Application was designed to have a minimal impact on existing infrastructure and codebases. It was designed using two microservices. One service was the HTTP interface for Heroku to interact with, which acted as a thin proxy layer for registering users on storj's bridge service. The second service was an SMTP service which auto-registered created users by intercepting mail sent from the bridge and forwarded non-registration emails to the email address on file with heroku for the addon.To test behaviour, end to end integration tests were written across the microservices and bridge using Docker and docker-compose.

* Member of the iojs and Node.js Docker Working Groups* Maintains the NodeSource Node.js and N|Solid docker registries* Maintains the dockeri.co badging service* Conducting on-site architecture evaluations* Writing software to support the N|Solid product

I am working with a group of motivated and talented people to establish a hackerspace in the Southern Illinois Area. We are currently setting up shop in Murphysboro Illinois on the same lot as Carruthers Grade School. We would like to offer an awesome venue where cool people can do cool things. The idea is to offer a social environment where people of all ages can come to network and improve their technical prowess. It is Wonka's Chocolate Factory for Coders. A wonderland of technology and talent. There is a lot of interest in the community for what we are trying to do, and amazing things are on the horizon.

As Director of the Saint Louis Area Undergraduate Research Symposium (STLAURS), William Blankenship restructured the organization to focus on the development of participating students. He transitioned STLAURS to be a fully student run organization which hosts an annual Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Saint Louis area. Many undergraduate students have the opportunity to participate in research at their university and attend research symposiums, however many students never see what it takes to put together a research symposium. By empowering students involved in STLAURS, he created an organization that offers students the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to bring together like minded individuals in industry to host a large scale event that encourages collaboration and the exchange of knowledge.

William Blankenship studied techniques for working with Big Data under the guidance of Dr. Zhu and Patrick Brown. This work focuses on processing large volumes of streamed data in real time.Previous work has explored expanding the CloudSim platform for modeling workflows in a Data Center Federation. CloudSim is a Data Center simulation platform built by the University of Melbourne. Implemented in Java, it is a powerful tool for quickly and efficiently implementing and testing job scheduling algorithms in a controlled environment. Currently, CloudSim does not have any built-in support for job scheduling algorithms that consider workflows, or interdependent jobs where the input of one job is the output of another. William Blankenship's work focused on building libraries that acted as extensions to the CloudSim platform, such as dagGen. These libraries are used within the SIUC High Performance Computing Laboratory.

Interning under IT Infrastructure's Project Management office at Boeing South Carolina, William Blankenship acquired a functional high level knowledge of Boeing's IT systems. Holding a leadership position, he developed a SharePoint solution for delegating tasks to Dell Contractors within the Boeing Company. This system ensured contractors were efficient and accountable in the work that they performed for Boeing, and reduced the overhead of communicating requirements.In addition to restructuring the communication between Boeing and the Dell Contractors, William Blankenship developed an application that ensured the physical inventory maintained by Dell was both accurate and up-to-date. It accomplished this by comparing the inventory (which was converted from their Excel document to the new SharePoint solution) against several of Boeing's internal asset management systems to check for inconsistencies. The rules for detecting inconsistencies were defined in an external configuration file, ensuring the application would scale and could be maintained without programming knowledge. The application ran through a web interface and wouldd generate a report of non-compliant computers.During his 3 month internship, he created an integrated project schedule using Microsoft Project. This schedule brought together data from multiple locations throughout the company and compiled it into a single, expandable document. The document was composed of a nested hierarchy of sub-projects each in their own Microsoft Project file, so individual teams could maintain their own projects independently.As a project management intern, he was tasked with Initiating the deployment of the Evidian login system for the entire factory at Boeing South Carolina. He also organized and help develop a metric system for measuring the productivity of a fabrication team and displayed the results on the shop floor in real time.

As a Freshman, William Blankenship interned under the Loads and Dynamics Group for BCA (Boeing Commercial Airplanes) in Everett Washington. Using the jFreeChart library and NetBeans Platform, he developed an application for graphing data collected from the Transonic Wind Tunnel at Boeing Field. This application included a large tool set allowing Engineers to sanitize collected data as well as model the behavior of the aircraft as simple 2 dimensional,and 3 dimensional linearizations and idealizations. In addition, this application had an intuitive user interface allowing the Engineers to manage the massive data sets generated by the wind tunnel in an effective and organized manner. The data generated by this application was exported and passed onto other groups for further analysis and to generate prediction models.One of the challenges William Blankenship faced during the development of the application was ensuring the correctness of the idealization algorithms. As a standard of correctness, William used MatLab's idealization function as it was already an accepted standard within the Boeing Company. He created a script generating massive data sets using functions, parametric equations, and randomly placed coordinates. He then created a unit test that output MatLab's idealization and that of the developed application to an excel spreadsheet computing the deltas between the results and generating detailed graphs.As a side project during the summer internship, William Blankenship helped assist a co-worker translate an application implemented in XMotif and C to Java.