Carl Lange

I joined Hawa Dawa in 2018. Hawa Dawa is a company in the air quality management space, building inexpensive, high quality air chemistry sensors mainly for local government. During my years at the company, I worked on many different aspects of the business, and I became responsible for a large part of Hawa Dawa's software, including their infrastructure, devops, and client-facing frontend code, large-scale satellite data exploration, and wind and pollutant modeling.

I had several roles at Hawa Dawa over my time at the company, including acting Head of Software, and sometimes switching between full-time and freelance work.

When I joined Hawa Dawa, code was being developed by several developers on a single production server, deployment meant saving a file, and developers had no realistic way to run code locally. Merge conflicts meant downtime. I spearheaded the operation to improve this situation drastically, instigating pull requests and merge requirements, containerising codebases, creating a managed infrastructure with transparent monitoring, and collaborating with team members to create sensible workflow processes.

As part of this operation, I migrated the entire development infrastructure to Kubernetes on Azure.

I wrote the vast majority of the customer-facing frontend, creating a comfortable and functional user experience for various users to determine the air quality in their vicinity.

As one of the most experienced developers at the company, I mentored other team members and delivered in-house training, as well as on occasion acting as team lead or head of software.

I used many technologies at Hawa Dawa, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana, PostgreSQL, React, Python, R, TypeScript, and many others - for some, championing their adoption within the company.

Trick16 is a creative technical consultancy that aims to make it easier for artists to create, by creating bespoke solutions for their workflow or project.

As the technical founder, my role is to interface with clients and write code. My co-founder originates projects and project manages.

Trick16 has been directly involved with artists' projects that have been exhibited internationally and ones that have never seen the light of day.

I joined Derilinx in late 2014, first as a contractor, moving into a full-time position after about six months. I was the architect and lead software developer on the Irish Open Data Portal, data.gov.ie, as well as many other projects and products. I oversaw the development of data.gov.ie for nearly all my time at Derilinx, bringing it from its first page view to its 1,500,000th. During this time I also acted as architect and lead developer on many other data portals, both nationally and internationally.

Other projects included many deep dives into datasets made available to us, including an expansive project to analyse hundreds of thousands of BER ratings for homes, allowing for accurate and effective retrofitting recommendations to be made to home owners. For these projects (and others) I used a range of different data science techniques and technologies, leading to a wide exposure to the field. I also obtained in-depth understanding of very disparate, arcane domains of knowledge, and gained the ability to find this knowledge quickly.

I was the most senior employee for nearly all the time I worked at Derilinx, typically working on multiple projects at once, managing expectations internally and face-to-face with customers. I carried out job interviews, handled support requests, was on-call (approximately 24/7), managed a team, and travelled to give on-site training, as well as writing thousands of lines of code per week.

I built many features of the Game Closure DevKit and developed several internal demo games over the course of a year. This included working on the actual SDK and various internal and customer-facing tools. I contributed to the development of almost every part of the SDK, including build servers, phone-to-browser debugging, native code, documentation, and development of the game engine itself.

In the process of building the SDK, I also contributed to some open source projects, including npm, js.io, and sweet.js (macros for javascript). I left Game Closure at the completion of my visa.