Hi! I'm Bill
As of July 2022: Currently plying my trade while learning React at Tillable
Stuff I've worked on:
- Lead the design of an upgrade of a legacy messaging system that handled prescription refills
- Built a service to interact with a third party fax application
- Python Serverless APIs using API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB and SQS
- Java Rest API sitting on top of Elasticsearch/S3/Athena
- Java application to aggregate stats messages into various time buckets
- Extract an 18T graph database while denormalizing/flattening and then load that data into Redshift
- Pyspark application running on AWS EMR to find counts of various stats in files in S3
- Maintained/Reformed/Expanded a legacy reporting system written in Ruby
- Designed systems with microservices at a large scale
How did I get here?
When I was little I loved to build things out of pretty much anything, Legos, Construx, even the coffee creamers you find at restaurants. My imagination ran wild as I built spaceships, houses, and pretty much every other building structure you can imagine. Then somewhere during my high school and college years I decided I wanted to make a lot of money and I thought the best way to do that would be to become a financial trader.
So after college, that's what I set out to do. I started out working on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading Eurodollar futures for a small proprietary trading firm. As time went by, computerized trading made the trading floor obsolete, so I moved off the floor and began trading in front of a computer (or on the screen as they say in the trading world). Eventually I was able to save up enough money to begin trading on my own.
While trading, I began to realize that what motivated me every day had nothing to do with money. I loved the challenge of solving a puzzle, in particular I loved it when I could solve a puzzle through the collaboration of others. I loved building trading models based on ideas I generated. I loved to learn.
Six years after going off on my own, I'm sitting in my home office and I began to contemplate my situation. My first realization was that I had this urge to build things. I had spent a ton of my spare time playing video games that involved building things and/or strategy. Games like Civilization, Sim City, and Minecraft would seem to cause hours from my life to evaporate.
My second realization was that I needed to collaborate with others. Early in my trading career I worked on teams to solve problems. As time went by I found my trading life became a case of me vs. the world.
I came to the conclusion that I needed to break out and build things.
So I applied to Dev Bootcamp to become a maker, and I learned more than I could have ever dreamed.
My Skills
Python, Java, Spark, AWS Lambda, SQS, EC2, S3, Redshift, Kafka, EMR, RDS, DynamoDB, API Gateway, Ruby, Node.js, HTML, CSS, SQL
My interests
I love learning. I think Wikipedia.org and its derivatives are my favorite corner of the web (as well as the site I visit the most). A natural extension of my love of learning is my love of travel. From attending U.S. vs England during the 2010 World Cup, to yodeling from the top of the Swiss Alps, to scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, I'm always ready to dive into a new adventure.
I'm passionate about helping others, and in particular mentorship. I currently mentor the undergraduate treasurer of my college fraternity. I also love mentoring more junior members of my team. I find that through mentorship, I learn just as much as I teach. I get a pretty big thrill watching others grow.