P Boykin
Independent Consultant at Self-employed
Paia, Hawaii, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolP Boykin is an independent consultant and senior engineer with 21 years of experience building machine learning, big data and distributed systems, most recently shaping recommendations at Netflix and the streaming feature-engineering infrastructure at Stripe. He blends deep theoretical chops—Ph.D. training in physics and strong grounding in information theory, statistics and probability—with practical systems work in Scala, Java, C++ and Python. As a long-time contributor to high-profile open-source projects (notably implementing HyperLogLog and core algebraic primitives in Twitter's algebird and improving Scala build rules and functional libraries like cats and fs2), he focuses on correctness, performance and elegant abstractions. Comfortable moving between low-level systems programming and algorithm design, he has a track record of turning research-grade ideas into production-quality code for large-scale data pipelines. Based in Maui, he pairs island living with a taste for “correct and fast” code that scales.
21 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors Physics Mathematics, Bachelors Physics Mathematics at Georgia Institute of TechnologyUniversity of California, Los Angeles
Spanish
Github Skills (28)
algorithm10
algorithms10
utf10
testing10
monoid10
data-serialization10
data-structure10
serialization10
scala10
stream10
recursion10
scalatest10
performance-optimization10
kryo10
bazel10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
twitter/bijection
Jan 2013 - Dec 2020
Reversible conversions between types
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 4 reviews, 191 commits in 8 years 1 month
Contributions summary:P contributed to the `twitter/bijection` repository by improving and fixing the `Bijection` class, which handles reversible conversions between types. Their work involved adding functionality for `String <=> Iterable[String]` conversions, merging with the develop branch, and fixing an issue with `Iterable[String] <=> Option[String]`. They also implemented the `Bufferable` typeclass, which is used for serialization and injections using `java.nio.ByteBuffer`.
conversionsreversible
twitter/algebird
Aug 2012 - Sep 2021
Abstract Algebra for Scala
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Algorithm Specialist
Back-end Developer & Algorithm SpecialistContributions:10 releases, 26 reviews, 465 commits in 9 years 3 months
Contributions summary:P contributed significantly to the core functionality of the algebird library, particularly focusing on implementing the HyperLogLog (HLL) approximate counting algorithm. They introduced the HLL Monoid, along with various optimizations, serialization support, and tests, showcasing a deep understanding of the algorithm's principles and performance considerations. In addition, the user improved the functionality of existing Monoids and contributed other mathematical primitives, demonstrating expertise in both back-end development and algorithm design.
scalaalgebraabstract-algebrafunctional-programming
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