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Ju Liu

Experienced Software Engineer

I'm passionate about building software the right way and I find pride in building elegant solutions to the problems that I am facing. I love using the best tools to get things done and I can't stop learning new things every day.

I am proficient in many programming languages, but my best expertise resides in Ruby, Elm, JavaScript, and Elixir. I'm an experienced public speaker and I enjoy the process of explaining abstract concepts using practical examples.

I am well versed in TDD and OOP, while being constantly amazed by the power of functional programming. I am very comfortable in a shell, using Vim as my daily editor and Git for keeping my code safe.

Experience

NoRedInk, Remote

Staff Engineer • Aug 2017 — Present

Working as a full-stack engineer in a Ruby, Elm, and Haskell product with 2 million active users. Putting a particular effort into making systemic changes to the codebase to improve its reliability and readability.

Erlang Solutions, London

Elixir Engineer • Nov 2016 — Jul 2016

Worked as a consultant in various Elixir projects, with a particular focus on onboarding teams to Elixir and introducing patterns for writing maintainable applications. Worked to improve the usability of Wombat, a monitorin and operations, by refactoring the AngularJS frontend.

AlphaSights, London

Lead Software Engineer • Mar 2014 — Sep 2016

Contributed substantially in maintaining and extending the application architecture, mainly composed of Rails, EmberJS, RabbitMQ, and Postgresql. Led various teams, including a remote team, handling communication with stakeholders and focusing on unblocking team members to increase the productivity of the team.

  • Led a project to switch one of the main workflows from the main Rails application to an EmberJS application. This involved all stages of the process, from database optimization to frontend component design.
  • Paired continuously and coached junior developers. Held developer universities to educate the team the technical choices and design patterns. Delved into existing code and applied rigorous techniques to refactor it while maintaining confidence in its core behaviour.
  • Created and contributed to many open-source projects, notably ember-calendar and ember-graphql-adapter.

weLaika, Turin

Software Engineer • Mar 2011 — Jan 2014

  • Developed web applications using Ruby, Python, and Javascript. A strong focus was given to object-oriented patterns, test-driven development, and agile methodologies.
  • Provided business consulting, managing projects as lead technical adviser, acquiring new clients, and maintaining communication with stakeholders.
  • Contributed to many open source projects, such as wordless and wordmove.

Politecnico di Torino, Turin

Ph.D. Fellow • Jan 2010 — Feb 2011

  • Developed an algorithm for high-speed network packet processing. The goal was to build a high-performance regular expression engine for the x86 family processor by exploiting the intrinsic parallelism of MMX and SSE instructions.
  • Worked on NetPDL, a language for describing network protocols from layer 2 to layer 7; the resulting instructions were passed to a virtual machine that compiled the high-level language to machine bytecode.
  • Published and presented "A Tunnel-aware Language for Network Packet Filtering" at Globecom 2010 in Miami.

Talks

Elixir Conf Europe 2020, Virtual

Taking back control of your life with Nerves

BobKonf 2020, Berlin

A Nokia 3310 Ringtone Player in Elm

Webcamp 2019, Zagreb

How to teach your computer to play guitar

Elixir Conf Europe 2019, Prague

Live coding an Escher painting using Scenic

RailsConf 2017, Phoenix

Predicting Titanic Survivors with Machine Learning

Elixir LDN 2016, London

Running Elixir on a Raspberry PI

EmberConf 2016, Portland

How I Learned to Love Ember

RubyConf Italy 2015, Turin

Sonic PI, Live Music, Live Coding

RubyConf Italy 2014, Treviso

The Design of Everyday Ruby

Education

Alta Scuola Politecnica

Master of Science, Computer Science • 2007 — 2009

Participated in a joint effort between Politecnico di Torino e Politecnico di Milano to create a multidisciplinary team to study and develop an innovative project: from our work on a wireless sensor network focused on improving the energy management in a complex building, a new project called Wifi4Energy was founded by the Politecnico di Torino.

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Erasmus Programme • 2008 — 2009

Participated in the Erasmus Programme and worked on my thesis project in a company in Stockholm, Acreo AB.

Politecnico di Torino

Master of Science, Computer Science • 2007 — 2009

Graduated summa cum laude as Master of Science from Politecnico di Torino in Computer Network Engineering with a thesis titled "Analysis and implementation of a constrained path computation algorithm in a multilayer GMPLS network."

Politecnico di Torino

Bachelor, Computer Science • 2004 — 2007

Graduated summa cum laude as Bachelor of Science from Politecnico di Torino in Computer Science.

Languages

  • Italian, native proficiency
  • English, full professional proficiency
  • Chinese, elementary proficiency