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Andrew Wichmann

Andrew Wichmann

Senior Software Engineer

Mintel | New York City

Technologies

I strive to wrangle complexity through conversation, data, and visuals

My Work

Take a look at my latest work.

project

Evaluate a Manufacturing Process

course

Understanding Data Engineering

DataCamp Course Completion

Take a look at all the courses I’ve completed on DataCamp.

My Work Experience

Where I've interned and worked during my career.

Mintel | Mar 2022 - Feb 2024

Senior Software Engineer

When I was promoted to a senior software engineer, I was instructed to increase my efforts at teaching and mentoring junior engineers. I did this by increasing the local development experience which had decayed significantly over the years at Mintel as many of the primary tool authors left the company. My approach was to remove much of the abstraction of the tooling for linting, testing, and docker services. I showed junior engineers the actual tools that were being invoked and encouraged them to research them and to invoke the commands directly to both learn about the tool and to do their jobs. In addition to local development, I wanted to impart the spirit of green-field development on a team laden with inherited tech debt, so, during the quarterly "in weeks", I helped organize events like hacakthons and workshops where over the course of two days, teams of 3-4 engineers got their hands dirty and created entire applications with tools like AWS Step Function, docker, and localstack. In addition to my mentoring role, I took a leadership role in the research and development of Apache Airflow DAGs to supplant outdated, expensive, opaque, and non-deterministic in-house enrichment pipelines. In keeping with my desire to bring my team along for the ride, I replicated every demonstration I did on each of my teammates machines to ensure that they had a good development experience. Apart from my primary role as a full-stack and data engineer, I also implemented and maintained the tooling to support event-based architecture at Mintel. This involved regular MRs for new event types and the accompanying AWS infrastructure, and it involved supporting adoption with documentation and live pairing sessions. Additionally, I took it upon myself to design, implement, market, and deploy a major API change to the consumer library to vastly simplify the API and expand the observability of event-based architectures.
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Mintel | Mar 2019 - Mar 2022

Software Engineer

As a Software Engineer at Mintel, my primary role was as a full stack engineer for the data entry systems that powered Omni Comperemedia. These applications were composed of React/Redux, Django, and Postgres. They were hosted on AWS using their ECS service. My team and I were responsible for nearly everything in the stack: - CI/CD (Jenkins/GitlabCI) - AWS infrastructure (provisioned by Terraform) - testing (pytest) - monitoring and alerting (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Sentry, OpsGenie) Some project I worked on during this period include: - Data entry auditing and reporting capabilities - New channel support for paid Facebook advertisements - New channel support for national TV advertisements - New channel support for paid social media advertisements across Twitter and Instagram To be honest, we did a bad job with security. We trusted that our web gateway service and our VPN to our VPC was secure without testing or auditing it. Additionally, our testing approach was very sporadic and inconsistent. We never came to a consensus about what should be tested and what the best approach to testing was. Often, it just came down to however the engineer was feeling when he or she wrote it.

Mintel | Jul 2017 - Mar 2019

Junior Software Engineer

Responsible for adding maintaining C++ and python data ingestion systems for Mintel's Comperemedia backend processes. Responsible for adding features to the Comperemedia website. Relevant technologies: Django, MySql + Postgres, BackboneJS + React, Solr, and Ceph + AWS. I also hosted a hackathon to get my team hands on experience with React which was mentioned in a blog by built in chicago

EMAC, Inc. | Jan 2016 - Jun 2016

Software Engineer Intern

I was responsible for designing, implementing, and testing scripts that loaded the software on to newly manufactured SoM microcomputers. Additionally, I created a C++ application for a customer who need a GUI to change the timezone on his EMAC SoM.

Southern Illinois University | Apr 2014 - Dec 2015

Resident Assistant

My time as a Resident Assistant (RA) for SIU Housing was spent observing and reporting resident developments to housing management on a weekly basis, promoting discussion and collaboration among fellow RAs, planning events, and designing bulletin boards on the floor.

My Education

Take a look at my formal education

Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc), Computer ScienceSouthern Illinois University, Carbondale | 2017

About Me

Andrew Wichmann

I am a highly-driven engineer who is eager to solve big meaningful puzzle with like-minded individuals. I have a wide range of skills from devops, to data engineering, to frontend development. I'm looking to start specializing in data engineer roles.

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