Over the years, I have built a career of high-utility, user friendly software across a variety of domains. I have always made it a goal of mine to continually learn new things – technical and non-technical – which has led me down the fulfilling path to where I am today. If you’re an engineer or game developer interested in collaborating, I am happy to connect!
Selected Game Projects
In my free time, I have fallen in love with making video games. Below are some of the projects I have worked. My full list of projects can be found on my itch.io page: olcoal.itch.io
Ol’ Coal’s Sky Shooter Demo
Unreal Engine 5 | C++ | Solo Project
Fast-paced third-person shooter with online multiplayer. Features explosives, hitscan weapons, and projectile weapons.
I primarily developed this as an exercise in implementing server-authoritative multiplayer. All non-engine game logic was written by me in C++ with some Blueprints acting as glue. All art assets were acquired from free materials on the Epic Marketplace. Some animations were sourced from Mixamo.
get the trash
Unity | C# | Solo Project
Prototype of a stealth game about grabbing trash. I had a lot of fun building this! This was my first attempt at implementing enemy AI. I originally envisioned this as being specifically about a raccoon, but I ended up going with a first-person perspective, and decided it didn’t matter to the game very much who or what the player character is.
All sound and 3D assets were purchased from the Unity Asset store. Except for the garbage can in the thumbnail. I created that masterpiece myself in Blender.
Professional Experience
PicnicHealth | June 2020-Present
I currently work at PicnicHealth, where I have mostly worked in offline structuring and processing of large amounts of medical records for research purposes. This was when I was on our data engineering team. Now I work in a full-stack capacity building internal systems where medical information is abstracted. I’ve enjoyed the privilege of working at both ends of the data pipeline! It has been fulfilling being both upstream and downstream of medical data capture.
I am proud of the leaps and bounds that we made in data engineering at Picnic. As we outgrew our data extraction pipeline, we made exponential improvements in runtime. When I started, some data extracts could take up to a week. Then, we cut that down to about 6 hours. Over time this grew again to double-digit hours, but after revamping our stack once again, we can now compile an even bigger dataset on-demand in less than 5 minutes.
Tools of note: Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, BigQuery, Kubernetes, Airflow
Civis Analytics | January 2019-June 2020
At Civis Analytics, I worked primarily on an identity resolution system in a truly full-stack capacity, including front end, backend, infrastructure, data pipelining, and machine learning. There were a lot of interesting technical challenges to solve! What was additionally fulfilling was that the technology was being used to streamline operations at non-profits and advocacy organizations.
I also did development work a more general purpose data science platform called, well, Platform, which also had a lot of really cool tech working under the hood. I still miss Platform’s container utilities sometimes.
Tools of note: PySpark, Python, Flask, Javascript, React, Kubernetes
Trustwave | June 2018 – December 2019
MY first job in the software industry! At Trustwave, I was a full-stack engineer building a compliance management application.
What was particularly interesting about eng at Trustwave is that we did not use JavaScript for front-end development but Dart, a Google-developed language that transpiles into JavaScript! I believe we were one of only a handful of companies to use Dart outside of Google (and even Google deprecated its internal use IIRC). Dart was a fun language, though less compelling in a world where TypeScript has heavy adoption.
Tools of note: Java, Spring, Dart, Angular, Kafka
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