kndwin

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Resume

I ran the below script against the repo's I've been working on and asked Google Gemini 2.5 Pro to summarised what I've done.

bash
git log --author="$(git config user.name)" --since="1 year ago" --name-status --pretty=format:"%h - %an, %ar : %s" > my_commits_last_year.txt

Toolbox ​

ScopeTech
FrontendReact (incl. React 19), TypeScript, Next.js, Vite, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, Apollo Client, MDX, Web Extensions (WXT)
BackendNode.js, Python, TypeScript, Postgres (OLTP), ClickHouse (OLAP), Redis, GraphQL, Prisma, Drizzle ORM, BullMQ
Cloud & InfrastructureAWS: ECS, ECR, RDS, ElastiCache, SQS, CloudFront, Route 53, S3, WAF, PrivateLink, IAM
IaC: AWS CDK, Docker
Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS), Karpenter
AI & DataLLM Services: OpenAI API, AWS Bedrock
Techniques & Libraries: Clustering (HBDSCAN, K-Means), RAG, Dimension reduction (UMAP, PCA), Embedding (Tuning, Sentence-Transformers)
Observability & DevOpsOpenTelemetry, Grafana, CloudWatch, GitHub Actions, Nango
Developer ToolsNix, Vim, Tmux, Colima

Work experience ​

Sauce - Senior Software Engineer (Aug 2024 - Current) ​

Infrastructure & Cloud Engineering (AWS CDK) ​

  • Led a major infrastructure refactor using AWS CDK to provision a new, isolated "Recipe" microservice, which included a new VPC, RDS database with a secure bastion host for debugging, and a full ECS deployment with an Application Load Balancer, ECR repositories, and CloudFront for content delivery.

  • Architected and implemented a robust, multi-stack CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions and AWS CDK, enabling automated, environment-specific deployments for different services (e.g., recipe-app, application) and improving release velocity and reliability.

  • Engineered and integrated a production-ready ClickHouse cluster using AWS PrivateLink, establishing secure, private connectivity between the ECS services and the OLAP database. Configured bastion hosts and security groups to allow for secure SSH and database connections.

  • Drove a significant architectural simplification by decommissioning the EKS cluster and removing Qdrant as a dependency, reducing infrastructure complexity, operational overhead, and associated costs.

  • Enhanced system observability and alerting by integrating AWS Managed Grafana for monitoring and configuring AWS Chatbot to send critical CloudWatch alarms directly to Slack, improving incident response times.

  • Scaled out the messaging and queueing infrastructure by provisioning multiple SQS queues via CDK (e.g., FeedbackSyncIngestionQueue, CustomerSyncIngestionQueue, DeleteHighlightQueue), enabling more robust and decoupled asynchronous processing.

  • Implemented auto-scaling for the Kubernetes cluster by adding Karpenter to the Qdrant search service declaratively through AWS CDK, optimizing resource utilization and cost-efficiency.

  • Assisted in enabling GPU instances for ECS to empower the machine learning service, allowing the team to leverage more powerful models for data processing and analysis.

Architecture & System Design ​

  • Spearheaded the design and full-stack implementation of a "Graph of Thought" research agent, a novel feature for complex, multi-step data analysis. This involved architecting new backend services, GraphQL APIs, database schemas with Drizzle ORM, and corresponding frontend components.

  • Drove a monorepo-wide refactoring to consolidate shared GraphQL schemas, types, and client configurations into a unified package, significantly improving code reusability, type safety, and developer experience across the service, ui, and web-extension projects.

  • Designed a summary persistence system with MDX support, allowing for the storage and retrieval of AI-generated summaries and enabling rich, formatted report rendering in the frontend.

Backend Development & Performance Optimization ​

  • Dramatically improved query performance for keyphrase trends by designing and implementing ClickHouse materialized views, reducing query latency from minutes to seconds and offloading intensive analytical work from the primary Postgres database.

  • Improved Postgres performance by analyzing queries with EXPLAIN, leading to targeted optimizations and schema adjustments that reduced query timeouts from over 60 seconds to under 5 seconds for critical data retrieval operations.

  • Implemented a Redis caching layer for frequently accessed data, including highlight counts and trend run results, which reduced database load and improved API response times for key application features.

  • Refactored the Python-based machine learning services for improved performance and cost-efficiency, transitioning from GPU-heavy sentence-transformer models to optimized OpenAI API calls for keyphrase extraction and topic generation.

  • Developed and secured a new API module with a comprehensive authentication and authorization layer, enforcing user-specific data access through database migrations and service-level logic.

  • Enhanced the backend research agent by adding a dedicated post-processing step for formatting reports, improving the quality, structure, and consistency of AI-generated output.

DevOps & CI/CD ​

  • Rolled out a semver release process using git tagging and GitHub Actions, which automatically generated and published detailed release notes to Slack, improving transparency and communication across the organization.

  • Integrated the Claude AI into the CI/CD pipeline for automated code reviews, helping to enforce coding standards, catch potential bugs, and improve overall code quality.

  • Configured and deployed OpenTelemetry across backend services, enabling distributed tracing and providing deep insights into application performance and request lifecycles.

Frontend Development ​

  • Led a significant frontend modernization effort by upgrading the main UI to React 19, refactoring numerous components to align with the new version's features while ensuring application stability and performance.

  • Championed the adoption of shadcn/ui and compositional patterns in the React codebase, which reduced bundle size through tree-shaking and improved the maintainability and consistency of the user interface.

  • Built and launched a new "Personal Feed" UI, providing users with a customized, dynamic, and engaging view of their data, complete with activity logs and trend visualizations.

  • Developed a feature-flagged, table-based view for browsing highlights, offering users an alternative to the existing list view with enhanced sorting, filtering, and bulk-action capabilities.

  • Upgraded the Chrome extension to Manifest V3, enhancing its functionality with new features and ensuring compliance with the latest browser standards.

Mirvac - Senior Front-end Engineer (Jan 2022 - Current) ​

  • Achieved "Employee of the Quarter" for delivering mobile of allowing users digital access through the app.
  • Led and implemented marketing website for a new building roll out, generating $500K in converted leads.
  • Improved upgrade efforts of mobile app by moving to Expo prebuilds, reducing upgrade migrations from hours of manual diff checking to an automated 10 seconds CLI command.
  • Improved React/code base by refactoring home-made solutions to industry libraries (react-query, react-table, and shadcn/ui).
  • Improved React build time by 80% by switching from CRA to Vite and using Bun for Github Actions, reducing an average of 5 mins down to 1 in our CI/CD.
  • Mentored new engineers through to their first PRs and provided detailed comments on best practices.
  • Managed internal engineer scaling issues by automating several manual processes and providing documentation.
  • Built a live retro feedback tool for other teams and initiated a company-wide hackathon.

Atelier - Full-stack Developer (Aug 2021 - Jan 2022) ​

  • Enhanced the front-end by developing reusable components using SASS and Apollo Client, resulting in improved code maintainability and enhanced user experience.
  • Implemented a robust backend infrastructure using Prisma, Nexus, and Apollo Server, ensuring seamless CRUD operations and optimal performance.
  • Established a comprehensive end-to-end testing framework using Cypress and integrated it with Circle CI, enabling automated testing on every branch push and enhancing code quality.
  • Designed and developed a sophisticated messaging system with GraphQL subscriptions and a Postgres pub/sub system, delivering real-time communication capabilities similar to Slack.
  • Led the migration of the existing Postgres database to AWS, leveraging the cloud platform's capabilities to enhance control, scalability, and uptime, ensuring a more robust and reliable database infrastructure.

Appian - Solution Engineer (Jan 2020 - Jul 2021) ​

  • Demonstrated expertise in supporting various components of the Appian stack, including application servers (Tomcat, JBoss), web servers (IIS, Apache), RDBMS (MySQL/Mariadb), Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch, and integrations with Appian.
  • Proficiently handled additional technologies such as AWS Cloud architecture, networking/VPN (IPsec), Linux (SSH/busybox tools), accessibility compliance (WCAG), and resource contention management (CPU/Memory/Threads).

Other experience ​

Fullsuite - Senior Software Engineer | Sep 2023 - Current ​

  • Implemented POC with encryption using libsodium CHACHA20-POLY1305 and exposed through Expo Modules.
  • Building Auth, Mobile (Expo), Web app (react), back-end (HonoJS, Turso) for a new startup.

Pitbull BSC - Front-end Developer (Mar 2021 - Jan 2022) ​

  • Implemented a Telegram price bot using Node.js, AWS Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Serverless (SLS).
  • Developed PitStop, a Next.js application utilizing ethers.js and web3modal for future application efforts.
  • Built PitChart, a GraphQL-powered data visualization tool displaying OLHC data over time using react-financial-chart.

Open source contributions and Blog ​

  • Honojs (Lightweight Express) - docs: update typo and add warning to #url() to use absolute URL (#203)
  • Outstatic (Git-based CMS) - fix: author name check (#169)
  • borabaloglu/cmdk-base - [core] Update useId dependency (#3)
  • NangoHQ/nango - docs: update rate limit code snippet (#3066)
  • NangoHQ/nango - fix: update error message for provider key missing (#2622)

Education and Certifications ​

University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) / Commerce (2014 - 2020) ​

  • Major: Mechatronics and Information Systems (Credit average).
  • Honours thesis (Distinction): Integration of communication platforms across different operating systems.

Amazon Web Services ​

  • AWS Developer Associate Certification (Score: 905/1000)

FreeCodeCamp (2020-2021) ​

  • Completed 4 certificates, each representing 300 hours of coursework:
    • Responsive Web Design
    • JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures
    • Front End Libraries
    • APIs & Microservices

Projects ​

Hayom ​

  • Link: Hayom - Source: GitHub - Linear clone
  • Used Evolu for sync engine layer.
  • Utilized xstate/store for efficient keyboard shortcut handling.

Linear Clone ​

  • Link: Linear clone - Source: GitHub - Linear clone
  • Implemented browser-based database technology with <100ms write and read speeds (eliminating network round trips).
  • Utilized xstate for efficient keyboard shortcut handling.

Real-time Retro ​

PDF Highlighter ​