William Roberts
Software Developer at Trust Lab
Berlin, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Roberts is a Berlin-based software developer with 15 years of experience building cloud-native backends, distributed systems, and production tooling. He has moved legacy, high-traffic e-commerce platforms to Kubernetes, designed microservice architectures and HA infrastructure (MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis), and modernized frontend build pipelines using webpack and npm. His background blends academic rigor—a PhD in Computational Semantics and years teaching and research in NLP—with pragmatic engineering, evidenced by test automation contributions to widely used projects like NLTK. Comfortable across DevOps, full-stack and backend roles, he excels at turning research-grade language technology into reliable production services. Notably, he pairs deep language-modeling expertise with hands-on automation and deployment skills, making him adept at shipping scientifically informed, scalable systems.
15 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computational Semantics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computational Semantics at Humboldt University of BerlinBachelor of Science - BS, Cognitive Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Cognitive Science at Queen's UniversityHigh School Diploma, High School Diploma at University of Toronto SchoolsMaster of Science - MS, Computational Linguistics, Master of Science - MS, Computational Linguistics at Universität des Saarlandes
English, German, French, Persian, Portuguese
Stackoverflow
4,919reputation
295kreached
88answers
1question
timedelta
top-5%
datetime
top-5%
python
top-5%
Github Skills (33)
unit-testing10
javascript10
npm10
python10
testing10
nltk10
cookiecutter10
webpack10
webpacker10
natural-language-processing10
nlp10
test-automation10
datetime9
flask-ask9
cicd9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
nltk/nltk
Mar 2013 - May 2015
NLTK Source
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:158 commits, 4 PRs, 11 comments in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:William's contributions focus on implementing and updating unit tests for the `nltk/nltk` repository, specifically targeting the `tgrep.py` module. The user wrote a series of unit tests to verify the tokenization process, various link types, and the functionality of tgrep searches. These tests cover diverse scenarios, including node matching, regular expression matching, dominance relations, and precedence relations, and also incorporated tests for handling of quoted node names and labeled nodes, ensuring the tgrep search feature's accuracy. Additionally, the user addressed encoding issues, verifying consistent behavior of tgrep search strings with both bytes and strings.
nlppythonmachine-learningnltknatural-language-processing
cookiecutter-flask/cookiecutter-flask
Jun 2017 - Jan 2018
A flask template with Bootstrap, asset bundling+minification with webpack, starter templates, and registration/authentication. For use with cookiecutter.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:35 commits, 2 PRs, 6 comments in 7 months
Contributions summary:William primarily refactored the project to use modern frontend tooling. They replaced Bower and Flask-Assets with npm and webpack, integrating a build process for JavaScript and CSS. The user also updated the project's build process to include linting, asset management with file-loader, and environment variable configurations, modifying the testing and deployment pipelines. These changes demonstrate expertise in frontend build systems and deployment configurations.
pythonflaskasset-bundlingtemplateboilerplate
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