Seth Falcon

Current

• Senior Software Engineer at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Past

• Senior Software Engineer at EVRI.com
• Statistical Research Associate at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
• Software Engineer at Insightful

see less...

Education

• Boston University

Recommended

1 person has recommended Seth

Connections

87 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

• My Blog
• My Company

Seth Falcon’s Summary

A product focused software engineer able to deliver features throughout a system from back-end services to front-end UI.

I believe in test-driven development, using the right tool for the job, building cheap prototypes, and letting data drive design choices. I enjoy building scalable, fault-tolerant web services and problems that have a data analysis component.

Seth Falcon’s Specialties:

Communicating with product managers, designers, and other engineers; Back-end web service development.

Technologies: Java, Ruby, Erlang, R, C, Python, SQL, CouchDB, Linux, git.

Seth Falcon’s Experience

• Senior Software Engineer

  Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

  (Non-Profit; Research industry)

  October 2009 — Present (2 months)

  Contributing software engineering expertise to the Program in Computational Biology at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
  
  Focused on advancing software for the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data for the Bioconductor project and making improvements to R to support the project.

• Senior Software Engineer

  EVRI.com

  (Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

  September 2007 — October 2009 (2 years 2 months)

  Development lead for Evri's Zeitgeist system that collects, analyzes, and vends usage data. Collaborated with product manager, designer, and engineers to define, estimate, and implement features.
  
  Built a fault tolerant scalable system of loosely coupled web services to aggregate and serve time-windowed activity data using HTTP/ReST, Java, BDB JE. The services are used to build popularity-driven user facing features and as a data source to improve ranking results.
  
  Initiated PopWhy, a feature to match popular entities with a news story explaining their popularity. Guided the project from prototype to production. PopWhy is used on the homepage, by a Twitter bot, and Evri's iPhone App.
  
  One of two engineers that produced EvriVerse, Evri's iPhone App. Self-taught Objective-C. Eliminated memory leaks and significantly improved performance.
  
  Dramatically improved Evri's canonical image coverage by creating imageherd, a simple Erlang-based web service and Javascript bookmarklet that allows users to select images from their browser window.

• Statistical Research Associate

  Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

  (Non-Profit; Research industry)

  2003 — 2007 (4 years )

  Technical Lead and release manager for Bioconductor, an open source project that provides tools for analyzing high-throughput data arising in the context of biological research.
  
  Direct supervision of three staff programmers. Responsible for managing biannual releases involving the coordination of developers distributed world wide to produce over 230 packages. Supported developers and users via project email lists.
  
  Added a global string cache to the R implementation that significantly reduced the memory footprint of common bioinformatics data sets. This effort was recognized by an invitation to become a member of the core R development team.
  
  Significant contributions to Category and GOstats packages (both written in R) to implement graph based statistical tests for over representation of entities in an ontological database.
  
  Improved performance and added features to RSQLite, an R package providing bindings to the SQLite embedded DBMS. http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Descriptions/RSQLite.html
  
  Taught advanced R programming courses in USA and UK including OOP in R and C extensions.
  
  Designed and implemented weaver, a caching system for dynamic documents used for reproducible research.

• Software Engineer

  Insightful

  (Public Company; Research industry)

  2001 — 2002 (1 year )

Seth Falcon’s Education

• Boston University

  MA , Mathematics , 1999 — 2001

Additional Information

Seth Falcon’s Websites:

• My Blog
• My Company

Seth Falcon’s Groups:

•    The R Project for Statistical Computing

Seth Falcon’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• reference requests
• getting back in touch