Hi!👋 I'm Ashton Sobeck

I am currently finishing up my Master's in Computer Science. I am team-oriented, goal-driven, and always excited to take on new challenges.

My Work Experience


Software Engineer Intern
Jan 22 - Present

  • Created a robust performance testing framework that enhanced knowledge of the system's performance and led to a 33% decrease in query execution time.
  • Contributed to both frontend and backend features that provided our customers with an even better user experience.
  • Utilized: Java, Dart, Python, SpringBoot, Locust Load Testing
  • Outcome:
    • A more advanced knowledge and understanding of the software development lifecycle.
    • Experience with a fully fledged out application and contributing production-ready code.
    • Mentoring experience to other interns as well as new engineers on the team during my tenure.

Cloud Engineer Intern
May 2020 - May 2021 & Aug 2021 - Dec 2021

  • Utlized AWS CloudFormation, Lambda and scripts to help support the Atlassian suite to maximize avilability and minimize costs.
  • Switched the QA environment to Spot Instances resulting in 25% monthly costs savings.
  • Utilized: AWS, Lambda, CloudFormation, Python
  • Outcome:
    • Hands-on experience with AWS environments and automating manual processes.
    • Experience performing maintenance and upgrading applications for users.
    • Experience in finding problems in current processes and taking charge to solve them.

Cloud Engineer Intern
Jun 2021 - Aug 2021

  • Automated manual processes to deploy software resulting in a time reduction of 70% to deploy.
  • Replicated existing architecture into AWS CloudFormation templates for replicating across different environments.
  • Utilized: AWS, Lambda, CloudFormation, Python
  • Outcome:
    • Experience in taking a fully manual process and automating it.
    • Gained experience with leveraging existing tooling to ease the workload and speed up the delivery of our automation tool.
    • Worked to create a CI/CD pipeline that would take our code and put it onto AWS GovCloud.

Software Engineer Intern
May 2020 - October 2020

  • Learned fundamental principles of frontend, backend, and API development.
  • Engaged in pair programming and other AGILE practices.
  • Utilized: ReactJS, ChakraUI, Java, SpringBoot
  • Outcome:
    • Gained experience with reading others' code and constructively providing feedback to it.
    • Experience working with other engineers and helping deliver features on time.
    • Gained experience in interactin with our end customers through bi-monthly product demonstrations.

Software Engineer Intern
Jun 2019 - Aug 2019

  • Created a Python tool that allowed for the parsing of XML configuration files that resulted in a decrease of complexity of running simulations.
  • Contributed unit tests to increase code coverage and increase knowledge of the codebase.
  • Utilized: C++, Python, XML
  • Outcome:
    • Gained experience working with researchers and experiencing what it is like to conduct research.
    • Gained experience in learning a new codebase and how to write comprehensive unit tests.


A Couple of My Projects

Can PCA Reduce Datset Size While Keeping Great CNN Performance?

  • We wanted to see if applying PCA to the CIFAR10 datset as an input to a CNN would produce satisfactory results while keeping the dataset size low.
  • We used Python and Keras to create, train, and visualize the results from our models.
  • We found that compressing 81.25% (6 of 32 principal components) of the data resulted in on par or just below image classification performance of using the full dataset.
  • Outcome:
    • Experience in creating a question in machine learning and figuring out an experiment to find the answer.
    • Gained experience with using Keras and building neural networks with it.
    • Gained experience in presenting findings to an audience.

Melbourne Pedestrian Density

  • Utilizing deck.gl and d3.js, we visualized the pedestrian density of Melbourne, Australia to show the busiest areas of the city at different times of the day.
  • We gave the user the option to compare different streets of Melbourne in which a comparative chart graphic would populate on the user's screen.
  • We also visualized the difference between the pedestrian density on a day when a natural disaster occurred and on a normal day to show the user the difference in densities.
  • Outcome:
    • Gained experience in finding a research paper and basing a project off of it.
    • Gained experience in creating sound visualizations that did not lie to the user.
    • Gained experience in taking feedback on iterations of our visualizations and implementing it.



My Interests

Full Stack Development

I am very interested in full stack development. I love having knowledge of every piece of a tech stack and have the knowledge to go into both a frontend and backend to fulfill a task. On top of that, I love learning new technologies and new ways to solve engineering problems.

Effective Communication

As an engineer, part of the job is to be able to effectively communicate with others. Whether that be non-technical parties like project management and UX, or other engineers, being able to communicate well with people is the key to getting things done. I am always looking to improve my communication skills so that I can be a better engineer.

Productivity

I am always looking for new productivity tools to aid at work. Whether it's Notion for keeping track of user stories and notes, or ideologies to help with focusing, I love finding new ways to think about working and being productive.



My Skills

Languages and Frameworks

Dart, Java, ReactJS, JavaScript, TypeScript, YAML, Python, C/C++

Other Skills

AWS, Agile, Git, Infrastructure as Code, Communication, Mentoring, APIs