Software engineer, Go enthusiast, and speaker with love for all things Open Source, Samantha spends her days developing Go microservices for computer vision-based applications for retail and healthcare solutions. She also has a history of developing Go microservices for industrial applications at the edge. She is CKAD certified, dedicates time to technical reviewing several Go textbooks, and is passionate about empowering early career and diverse professionals.
Samantha has presented at various conferences and competitions in the past that show her dedication to diversity and inclusion, sustainability and ethics, and growing herself as an engineer. Her favorite conference experience to date has been the surprise of presenting at GopherCon 2022 main stage!
Samantha is part of a family of Gophers! She enjoys attending GopherCon with her older brother, Ethan - the OG Gopher of the family, and her identical twin sister, Cassandra - the other Gopher in the family.
I am working on a reference implementation to automatically run inferencing through a ML pipeline at the edge within the healthcare space. I worked on the Go backend services, set up Go integration testing, and enabled observability and log analytics through the additions of TIG stack - Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana and ELK stack - Elasticsearch, Logstash (replaced with Filebeat), and Kibana. I am working to implement internationalization, traceability, and improve stability, among other backend tasks. The technology used includes Go, Angular, Docker, REST, EdgeX Foundries, TIG & ELK stack, Agile Scrum practices, and a microservice-based architecture.
I also assisted an AI developer experience project to identify pain points and potential solutions for novice AI developers. We were working to design computer vision (CV) tools to enable end users to better deploy CV solutions at the edge focusing on camera placement, solution observability and telemetry, technical innovations around in/out occupancy counting, etc. A patent was submitted leveraging this work, and these efforts were continued to assist in testing an internal AI model development offering.
I previously developed a Smart City (security as a service) solution. This was an Open Source project using Go, Python, Postgres, Angular, Grafana, Docker, Agile Scrum practices, REST, OpenVINO, GStreamer, and a microservice architecture. This solution was presented at the OSS and is linked here. The Go integration testing solution journey was presented main stage at GopherCon 2022 and is linked here.
I contributed on backend efforts to update several Go microservices to using the Ryer pattern, Cobra pkg, and an explicit client/server paradigm. I helped establish monitoring services for the microservices using Prometheus, Grafana, Node Exporter, and Docker. I also helped with the deployment of the microservices to cyberphysical test beds, pioneered the testing suite for service-level testing using the test-containers pkg, and contributed on various other backend projects.
I created templates to build and deploy Python packages and Docker containers using Azure MLFlow and Databricks. Contributed on a team developing infrastructure with Ansible and Terraform w.r.t. internal tools.
Brought to the table scaling strategy for production Kubernetes cluster. Collaborated on various Go programs for Saas platform on Azure. Utilized Ansible Automation software to automate and track the restarting of services.
Implemented a tuning framework for data placement in unified memory systems characterizing the performance trade offs of host and device placement at the data structure level. Presented research on the Dynamic Facility Layout Problem at the Super Computing Conference, and presented research on runtime efficiency and resource consumption for languages with widely varying architectural elements.
Gathered Kubernetes cluster metrics for Saas infrastructure in AWS. Scraped cluster metrics with Prometheus and displayed with Grafana. Worked on AWS Lambda functions with a focus on cost efficiency.
Designed database and backend infrastructure for Project Labor Management. Engineered user interface for simplifiying work allocation tasks for the corporation.
Utilized Linux CLI to review and grade student assignments for Data Structures and Assembly Language.
GPA: 4.0
Apart from being a computer scientist, I enjoy most of my time being outdoors. I love running and working out to stay active and fit. I also am a member of a community volleyball league where I laugh so hard my face hurts. It's a blast.
When indoors, I like to work on crafts projects with my Cricut, play with my dog and kitties, and spend a large amount of my free time exploring the latest technology advancements in the Gopher and Open Source community. I love all things related to Go, Open Source, and AI/ML.
Outside of keeping myself busy with work, career-growth activities, and conferences, I am focusing on travel activites and trying to figure out what/when/where my next move will be. Stay tuned :)
Presented on the journey our team had in implementing a Go integration testing solution for our Smart City Solution intead of the typical Python Robot framework approach our organization would take. This was a recorded presentation with a colleague that received many questions, and was well received by the internal Intel audience. It highlighted the software process improvements and organizational benefits this change created through improved software quality, happier developers, and implemented cutting edge technology.
Presented main stage at GopherCon 2022 to a room of ~600 attendees on my team's journey through integration testing with Go, and what could Go wrong (pun intended!). We discussed the steps to set up test dependencies, the creation of a custom package to help write test cases, and issues where packages were adding characters to Go test output resulting in the misinterpretation of those results by our test report tool. It was quite the journey, and a fun one to present and share learnings on! Information on the talk may be found on the GopherCon website and via the YouTube recording.
Presented a hands-on workshop with a colleague leveraging Open Source tooling to simplify & automate the video/image labeling process. This was presented to a room of ~170 workshop attendees where we used Computer Vision Annotation Tool (CVAT), which is hosted under the OpenCV umbrella, to annotate video footage, understand the challenges and best practices along the way, and demonstrate how much of a team-centric activity this process is for a person tracking annotation project.
This was my first time speaking at a professional conference. I love OSS because of the amazing community, networking opportunities, learnings, and experiences. Neethu and I presented on our team's Smart City Solution which leverages a bunch of Open Source technologies. We had ~90 attendees, an excited room, and lots of questions. It was a blast! Info on our presentation can be found here and the recording may be found here. I also participated in the 5k for the conference one morning!
This summit was all about leadership and shaping the future together. I really enjoyed the talk on courageous leadership to deconstruct the impossible, as well as the one on perspective and our own visual and vocal image.
I got goosebumps listening to many of the talks for this virtual conference. I loved the talks on building trust in the new hybrid workspace, power and confidence, and facing your fears: stop being held back. As I am defining what I want out of life and my career aspirations, this conference really hit home for me.
This virtual conference was so inspirational. The theme was aspire to inspire. I really enjoyed the talks on using fear as fuel to overcome our own barriers to change, inspirational insights on radical candor to create a culture of feedback, and entrepreneurship..
This virtual conference covered a wide range of leadership topics from transformative leadership, how to be a better team player, leadership in horse packs, and financial planning.
This conference was full of AWS talks, workshops, labs, people, and more. I furthered my knowledge of AWS services, and am using this knowledge to work towards getting my first AWS certificate.
I learned more about opportunities within the open source community, and met so many amazing people at this conference. I want to work on more projects within the Go community.
This is absolutely my favorite conference thus far! I was able to learn about cool things going on with Go, network with gophers, and share this experience with my twin sister and brother.
I was able to network with graduate students and researchers to learn more about High Performance Computing. I also presented a poster on the Dynamic Facility Layout Problem (DFLP), where we proposed a more efficient solution for facility layouts in terms of material handling costs and relocation costs.
I presented research I conducted on several programming languages with widely varying architectures. I analyzed resource consumption and runtime efficiency and presented my work with a poster.