Alexander Dickinson

Software Engineer

Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer

• Expanded our audience by implementing localization support on the frontend, backend, and in our CI/CD pipeline.
• Improved user experience, and increased monetization and Google search rankings by eliminating URLs with poor core web vitals on desktop and mobile versions of our website.
• Increased productivity of content localization staff by creating a localized strings editor and data editor in our custom CMS tool.
• Increased maintainability and reliability, and reduced development time of our frontend and backend by writing unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.
• Improved performance of our custom CMS tool by minimizing network requests through Apollo’s caching and pagination APIs.

Software Development Engineer, Elastic Block Store

• Improved service scalability by designing an ETL consumer around Kinesis Firehose with AWS Lambda data transformation and SQS, as to transfer data between relational and NoSQL databases.

Software Development Engineer Intern, Elastic Block Store

• Improved service scalability by designing an ETL producer around Kinesis Data Streams and the Kinesis Producer Library, to transfer data between relational and NoSQL databases.
• Implemented and deployed ETL producer in an AWS region.
• Presented project goals and implementation details to multiple teams in Elastic Block Store.

Research Experience for Undergraduates Participant

• Highlighted severity of replication crisis in computational physics research by demonstrating difficulty of replicating published paper results using researcher-provided code.
• Advocated for a more open and collaborative computational research culture by presenting findings at the Illinois Summer Research Symposium orally and in a poster session.

Education

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Summa Cum Laude

Bachelor of Arts, Religious Studies