Alex Gessner

Curriculum Vitae

Companies

Shopkeep, December 2012 – December 2017
Shopkeep is an iPad-based point-of-sale system for merchants. We help them accept payments, track inventory, manage their employees, and run all manner of historical reports. In December 2012, we were 40 employees (12 engineers), and I was a Software Engineer. 5 years later, we were 270 employees (60 engineers) across 4 international offices, and I was the Director of Data.

I built lots of stuff mostly around the design and scalability of data: moving/streaming it, storing it, analyzing it, and building useful products on top of it. What I’m most proud of though, are my teams and the people I helped grow. Here are some of the technologies we used:

  • Data Pipeline + Python + Redshift + Looker (and Nosetest)
  • Kafka + Python + ElasticSearch + Flask (and PyTest)
  • Pandas + Scikit-Learn + PySpark + Word2Vec (and Nosetest where reasonable)
  • Ruby on Rails + Postgres + Redis (and Rspec, my one true love)

Agree the People, May 2012 – December 2012
Agree the People is a startup attempt (postponed indefinitely — sigh) to rethink American political discourse for the internet. By addressing cognitive biases directly, I believe an arbitrarily large number of people can debate an issue asynchronously and achieve equilibrium if not consensus.

Education

MS Systems and Information Engineering: UVA 2012
For my thesis research, I built (after running an academically defensible experiment) a prediction algorithm for ECG transmissions from ambulances en route to the UVA hospital (via an iPhone app). A project called STEMISEND grew out of my research; I was a technical advisor and rebuilt most of the applications in my spare time over the following few years. We won the Best Paper Award at the 2012 IEEE Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium.

Infosys Corporate Training: 2007
This was a six month program in Mysore and Bangalore, India in “Open Systems” which was basic computer science with C++ and MySQL. I learned so much in this program, but most of it had nothing to do with computers.

BS Aerospace Engineering: UVA 2006
For my thesis research, I evaluated existing analytical modeling tools of flapping, flexible wings for the design of insect-scale micro air vehicles with military applications. I graduated Magna Cum Laude and received the Chairperson’s Outstanding Aerospace Engineering Award in 2005. I also got a minor in Asian Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures.

Things you can find on Github:

  • Fun With XPUBs:When I first read about BIP32 and extended public keys, it kind of blew my mind. It seemed too good to be true, so I wrote a bunch of code to prove to myself that it wasn’t, and then a blog post to share the joy of my discovery.
  • Pagan Army: This is just some recent fun with anagrams. There’s a performance test in a Jupyter notebook if you want to cut right to the conclusions. tl;dr always choose the hash map.
  • AWS ETL Tools: This is an opinionated set of python tools for repeatably loading data into Redshift. I extracted it from my work at Shopkeep.
  • Alexa Trump: In early 2016, I made an Amazon Echo app that responds to any question with a sometimes-relevant Donald Trump quote. I haven’t updated the content since March 2016, because it all started to get a little too real. If you own an Echo though, you can search for it in the store. And check out the sweet logo I made!
  • Modified Random Forest: In 2011 (for something like extra credit in my data mining class), I built my own Random Forest in R so I could test out the impact of a low level change to how a hyperparameter is implemented: sorta like randomizing the randomness.
  • Small contributions to other projects here and there.
  • Half-built efforts that probably aren’t terribly interesting.

Papers and Academic Stuff:

My Acting Career:

  • IMDB page
  • American Friend #1 in the hit 2007 Telugu film, Chandamama:


    • I’m in a white shirt and blue pants, and you can stop watching after ~15 seconds :)