Altay Guvench
Software Engineer at Weights & Biases
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAltay Guvench is a seasoned software engineer and two-time Y Combinator alum with 17 years of experience building web and ML developer tools, currently at Weights & Biases as the first engineering hire focused on React front-end work for a unicorn AI platform. He co-founded 10x Management, the pioneering talent agency for technical freelancers, and has a track record of marrying product intuition with engineering—transitioning from non-technical founder to hands-on coder in Javascript and Ruby on Rails. His open-source contributions include back-end authentication work on iNaturalist and adding audio-logging features to the widely used wandb platform, reflecting both backend and ML-centric engineering chops. A Harvard-trained neuroscientist with a parallel career as a recording musician and touring bassist, he brings uncommon cross-disciplinary creativity—whether hacking Arduino music-LEDs or photographing ultraviolet fluorescence—to technical problem solving.
17 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BA, Biology (Neuroscience), BA, Biology (Neuroscience) at Harvard University
Stackoverflow
81reputation
3kreached
1answer
4questions
Github Skills (32)
apim10
ruby-rails10
python10
omniauth10
machine-learning10
user-authentication10
authentication10
rails10
ruby10
audio10
deeplearning-ai10
deep-learning10
api10
data-science9
twitter9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
inaturalist/inaturalist
Apr 2011 - Mar 2013
The Rails app behind iNaturalist.org
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:110 commits in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Altay's commits primarily involve implementing and integrating third-party authentication methods (Facebook, Twitter, and OpenID) using the OmniAuth library. They added and modified code related to user models, controller actions, and configuration files to support user creation, login, and account linking through these external providers. Furthermore, they refactored the code to move API keys and secrets to the configuration files and fixed bugs related to user email handling.
ruby-on-railsrails-apprailsinaturalistruby
wandb/wandb
Jun 2018 - Nov 2018
The AI developer platform. Use Weights & Biases to train and fine-tune models, and manage models from experimentation to production.
Role in this project:ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:9 commits, 7 pushes, 6 tags in 4 months
Contributions summary:Altay primarily contributed to enhancing the Weights & Biases platform by adding functionality and fixing bugs related to data types and logging. They added support for the `Audio` data type, including features for audio array logging and metadata. They also addressed a histogram-related error and made improvements to existing features, such as `wandb status`, ensuring a smoother user experience.
pythoncollaborationtensorflowhyperparameter-tuningcli
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