Personal Programming Notes

To err is human; to debug, divine.

Cuong Dong-Si

My resume in HTML format.

Skills

Honor & Awards

Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer, Apple (7/2018 - present)

  • Apple News & Stocks & Weather.
  • Recent achievements:
    • Key contributor for migration of backend services for Apple News/Stocks to Kubernetes: implemented proofs of concepts (PoCs) with various integrations with other Apple internal services. Designed and implemented Kustomize plugins for YAML templating and secrets management. Designed and implemented Kubernetes RBAC for access control and team authorization. Contributed to our Kubernetes monitoring solutions including highly available Prometheus, AlertManager, Grafana setups and created Grafana dashboards.
    • Regularly demoed and presented various Kubernetes features with internal and external teams to help with Kubernetes onboarding. Recommended the teams on various Kubernetes best practices and design choices.
    • Designed and implemented CI/CD solutions for deployment to Kubernetes, including containerized, highly scalable Jenkins and ArgoCD setups. Completed with integration with internal Github OAuth for authentication/authorization, Grafana dashboards for Jenkins and ArgoCD monitoring. Developed Jenkins shared library for GitOps implementations with Jenkins and ArgoCD.
    • Designed and implemented PoC for Kubernetes-based services that consume from Kafka, to reduce Kafka rebalancing and improve the services' overall performance and availability.
    • Designed, implemented and lead the effort to migrate release runbooks from error-prone Quip-based runbooks to Jupyter-based runbooks. The runbooks are highly automated and extendable, completed with auto-generated Splunk queries, posting Slack updates, leading to significantly reduced deployment time during product launches.
    • Designed and implemented various Python tools to simplify interaction with internal Apple services and APIs, complementing Jupyter runbooks. Designed and implemented simple Kubernetes operators and Go-based services for supporting Kubernetes operations.
    • Contributed to internal Gradle plugins for building Docker images and deploying to Kuberentes/ArgoCD. Improved Gradle plugins' performance by using Task Configuration Avoidance API.

Senior Member of Technical Staff, Salesforce (10/2016 - 6/2018)

  • Salesforce IoT. Worked with AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, Groovy/Java, CI/CD.
  • Achievements:
    • Designed and implemented a solid CI/CD platform from scratch as the foundation for launching IoT Explorer into production.
    • Built a robust, highly-available Kubernetes infrastructure on top of internal Compute services at Salesforce (similar to AWS EC2 & S3). Designed and implemented highly-available Prometheus and AlertManager stack for monitoring Kubernetes infrastructure. Integrated with PagerDuty and Slack for notification and Grafana for visualization and dashboards.
    • Designed and implemented fully containerized Jenkins systems (production and experimental) running on the above Kubernetes infrastructure, integrated with other systems and services such as Github/GHE, DockerHub, Artifactory, Nexus, Slack, PagerDuty.
    • Implemented various key features such as Docker images, access control, Jacoco-based code coverage gates, Slack/email notifications. Contributed extensively to the shared global Groovy library for Jenkins to reduce code duplication and ease Jenkins pipeline configuration for developers. Built solutions and infrastructure for front-end CI/CD (Dockerized Headless browser, PhantomJS).
    • Designed and implemented Kubernetes-backed micro-services for continuously syncing Github/GHE commits to GUS, integrating HBase schema upgrade to Perforce, and posting to Chatter on build successes.

Software Engineer II, Intuit (12/2014 - 10/2016)

  • Designed and implemented automation frameworks and tools for Big Data projects for QuickBooks Online and Small Business Group (SBG) ecosystem. Worked with business analysts and data scientists on project requirements to develop appropriate tools and automation solutions.
  • Projects and Achievements:
    • Designed and implemented an automated verification framework to validate SQL scripts, verifying Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes between data sources (e.g., Netezza, Hive, HDFS, Vertica), and validating data consistency and integrity.
    • Member of team “Ahab” that won Intuit Data Hackathon: Using Docker containers to recreate data warehouse infrastructure and pipelines in local environment for efficient ETL development and testing.
    • Three Intuit Spotlight Awards for demonstrating Intuit Values: “Learn Fast” 2015, “Deliver Awesome” 2015, and “Deliver Awesome” 2016.

Software Engineer, Objectivity Inc. (7/2012 - 12/2014)

  • Designed and implemented automation frameworks to facilitate scalable testing for company’s database products, Objectivity and InfiniteGraph.
  • Selected Projects and Achievements:
    • Designed and implemented performance benchmark for measuring data ingestion performance of graph database InfiniteGraph in distributed settings, including automated performance test framework in Python that orchestrate Java-based clients ingesting data simultaneously from multiple remote Windows and Linux hosts.
    • Designed and developed an automated test suite for testing Java byte code injection tools, including a custom Java parser (based on ANTLR) to verify correctness of decompiled byte codes after injection.
    • Developed functional tests for Talend data connectors in ETL pipelines for transforming data from MySQL and Cassandra databases to Objectivity databases.

Education

  • Master of Science, University of California, Riverside. GPA: 3.92/4
    • Designed and implemented sensor fusion algorithms for accelerometers, gyroscopes, and cameras, with applications targeted for smartphones, VR headsets, and driverless car navigation systems. The algorithms, based on probabilistic models and statistical inference methods, are implemented and published in peer-reviewed conferences (ICRA, IROS).
  • Bachelor of Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore. GPA: 4.42/5

Courseworks & Trainings

Lifelong learning and professional training after college.

Publications

  • Estimator initialization in vision-aided inertial navigation with unknown camera-IMU calibration. IROS 2012. PDF
    • Earlier work as Technical Report: PDF
  • Consistency analysis for sliding-window visual odometry. ICRA 2012. PDF
    • Technical Report: PDF
  • Motion tracking with fixed-lag smoothing: Algorithm and consistency analysis. ICRA 2011. PDF
    • Technical Report: PDF
  • Technical Report: Application of the MSCKF algorithm on the Cheddar Gorge Wildcat Dataset. PDF
  • Extraction of shady roads using intrinsic colors on stereo camera. SMC 2008. Technical report
  • Robust extraction of shady roads for vision-based UGV navigation. IROS 2008. Technical report