Alex Z
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Z is an entrepreneur and software educator with 11 years of technical experience based in San Francisco, best known for founding Codesmith, a 12-week immersive program that prepares graduates for software engineering roles at top US companies. He combines hands-on backend development and QA expertise—evidenced by contributions to the high-profile Apache MXNet project where he optimized loss-update performance and strengthened unit tests—with a talent for building products that gain attention in developer communities (his Icecomm.io project hit #2 on Hacker News). Trained originally in chemical engineering and biochemistry at UCLA, Alex brings a quantitative, experimental mindset to software curriculum design and engineering problems. He balances product instincts with low-level code hygiene, shipping pragmatic improvements that boost reliability and test coverage while mentoring the next generation of engineers.
11 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Science (BS), Chemical Engineering, Biochemistry, Minor in Biomedical Research, Bachelor of Science (BS), Chemical Engineering, Biochemistry, Minor in Biomedical Research at University of California, Los Angeles
English
Github Skills (7)
unit-testing10
mxnet10
deep-learning10
python10
metric10
test-automation9
ndarray9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
apache/mxnet
May 2018 - Dec 2018
Lightweight, Portable, Flexible Distributed/Mobile Deep Learning with Dynamic, Mutation-aware Dataflow Dep Scheduler; for Python, R, Julia, Scala, Go, Javascript and more
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & QA Engineer/Test Automation Engineer
Backend Developer & QA Engineer/Test Automation EngineerContributions:38 commits, 67 PRs, 1 push in 7 months
Contributions summary:Alex contributed to performance improvements within the loss update functionality, optimizing the codebase by converting predictions to lists and removing unused lines. They also added and modified unit tests for metrics, including loss, accuracy, and f1, ensuring the correctness of the calculations and shape checks. Furthermore, the user refactored and expanded the unit tests, including adding edge cases and handling NDArray inputs.
pythonschedulerdataflowmutationdata-science
azai91/alfred-venmo-workflow
Nov 2015 - Dec 2015
Contributions:2 releases, 86 commits, 16 pushes in 29 days
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