I’m a Software Engineer with a passion for functional programming and the clean, efficient systems it empowers me to build. I have five years of back-end and Android experience, and my favorite tools are Scala, Python, and the functional programming libraries available for Java 8.
Founder @ GiveNow is a location based "Uber for donations" app that lets you donate necessities from anywhere to the people who need them most. Currently launched in Berlin, Germany to help address the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis. From October 2015 to Present (3 months) San Francisco Bay AreaSoftware Engineer @ Android consulting for special projects in Berlin, Germany and San Francisco, CA. From October 2015 to Present (3 months) San Francisco Bay AreaAndroid Instructor and Mentor @ As an alumni of the CodePath spring 2014 Android bootcamp, I regularly teach Android classes at evening and weekend workshops, as well as mentor students at current bootcamp cohorts. From April 2014 to Present (1 year 9 months) San Francisco Bay AreaSoftware Engineer @ As a key Android engineer, I worked to bring Talko's revolutionary voice app, currently iOS-only, to the Android platform, while enhancing the existing codebase with robust functional abstractions.
• Implemented core features such as Push Notifications and Contact Sync on the Android product while judiciously adhering to Material Design guidelines.
• Upgraded our codebase to Java 8 by way of retrolambda, a bytecode transformer unlocking advanced functional Java 8 features such as lambdas and static method references on Android.
• Introduced functional monads such as Optional types, which virtually eliminated NullPointerExceptions and other defects from our codebase. From May 2015 to September 2015 (5 months) San Francisco Bay AreaSoftware Engineer II @ As a senior engineer on the Datamapper team, I developed and optimized TripIt’s industry-leading email parsing technology that imports over 100,000 email confirmations per day into our travel itinerary app, using Python, C, and most recently, Scala.
• Prototyped and tested an algorithm to procedurally generate, test and score XPath expressions in Scala as part of a rearchitecture of core parsing technology, relying heavily on the ScalaZ functional programming library.
• Designed and implemented a document classifier that used Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD)-optimized logistic regression and classified emails with 98% accuracy, reducing the need to write regular expressions by employing a machine learning approach.
• Reduced daemon start-up times 90% by extending the Python regular expression C library to support caching of compiled regex objects.
• Created a hackday project in under 24 hours that parsed frequent flyer program emails and was launched as a paid feature in December 2013, increasing new user signups and reversing a negative trend in user retention.
• Deployed robust, unit-test based Jenkins instances and configured automated YUM repository infrastructure to enable continuous integration and deployment. From October 2011 to May 2015 (3 years 8 months) Android Engineer @ Volunteered time and services to the One Warm Coat organization to help launch an Android app to the public to enable easy coat donations and easy volunteering.
• Attended 8 week Android Bootcamp offered by CodePath - http://codepath.com/
• Brainstormed and proposed numerous potential app ideas to the One Warm Coat team.
• Designed and developed a distributed location-based Android application using Google Maps, Parse, Card.IO and Stripe technologies that enabled volunteers to donate and collect coats for One Warm Coat.
Worked as a group of 3 to develop the app and was selected to present at the public demo day, earning the $5,000 grand prize judged by industry leaders in the mobile community. From March 2014 to March 2015 (1 year 1 month) San Francisco Bay AreaProgrammer Analyst @ At the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, I developed IronPython-based desktop apps to control the production of radiopharmaceuticals, tailored to the requirements of principal investigators who were conducting clinical trials at WashU’s nuclear medicine research center.
• Developed an extensible, multipurpose control scheme application in IronPython for radiopharmaceutical production monitoring, automation, and control that replaced eight legacy VB6 applications.
• Designed user interfaces and created custom controls to meet unique laboratory UX needs.
• Wrote custom wrappers that enabled interoperability with analog and digital I/O subsystems from .NET code.
• Streamlined application deployment to different modules with a customized YAML-based configuration system. From June 2010 to October 2011 (1 year 5 months) Software Engineer @ • Developed and deployed customized versions of an e-Commerce website for fifty individual clients as part of GetMyMeal.com, an online ordering system designed for restaurants. From January 2008 to June 2010 (2 years 6 months) Unix Administrator Co-op @ Spending a semester with the Unix Team at Monsanto’s global HQ, I wrote a Python monitoring webapp utilizing the VMware API to track and report on 450 virtual machines residing on an 18-host ESX cluster. During two separate SAN outage emergencies, my app enabled us to rapidly triage and prioritize the restoration of production VMs, drastically reducing the downtime of servers responsible for the sale of seed (with revenue estimated at upwards of $5MM an hour). From June 2007 to December 2007 (7 months) Student IT Consultant @ • Provided technical support and troubleshooting to 7 university computer labs consisting of 550 computers by assisting users with network, software, and hardware problems. From September 2004 to May 2006 (1 year 9 months)
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Computer Science @ Missouri University of Science and Technology From 2006 to 2009 Afik Cohen is skilled in: Scala, Java, Android Development, Python, Unix, C, C++, C#, .NET, Regular Expressions, Web Services, Android, Redis, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence