Niko's Project Corner

Hi!

I am Niko, a Soft­ware En­gi­neer and Ar­chi­tect, an Ap­plied Math­emat­ics en­thu­si­ast and an all-around hob­by­ist. My main in­ter­ests are at hor­izon­tally scal­able ar­chi­tec­tures and al­go­rithms, data sci­ence and ma­chine learn­ing and some less known pro­gram­ming lan­guages such as Clo­jure and CUDA. Pro­fes­sion­ally I don't mind get­ting my hands dirty with C++ when high per­for­mance is re­quired but usu­ally I find my­self writ­ing Mat­lab, Python or Bash scripts. I try to keep my up-to-date with all of these tech­nolo­gies but of course there are too many stay 100% on track on ev­ery­thing that is go­ing on. Tech­nol­ogy and frame­works are evolv­ing so fast! This pic­ture is a sum­mary of tech­nolo­gies I have used so far on pro­jects:

Figure 1: High­light of Data Sci­ence tech­nolo­gies I have used so far (orig­inal from here).

I have al­ways done small pro­jects dur­ing my free time, but be­fore this blog I just had fold­ers lay­ing on my com­put­ers and maybe some screen­shots in Drop­box. It was dif­fi­cult to share them with oth­ers and in ret­ro­spect re­mem­ber which ma­jor pro­jects I had done in re­cent years. This mo­ti­vated me to start com­pil­ing this blog, but first I had to write my own blog­ging en­gine ;). It is based on Git for SCM and CMS, L^aT_eX for writing, PHP to generate navigation links etc. and mus­tache tem­plat­ing to generate the final HTML. More de­tailed info can be found from the Blog­ging plat­form ar­ti­cle, but ac­tu­ally now that I'm past PHP stage of my ca­reer I'm in the mid­dle of a long pro­cess of port­ing this en­gine to Clo­jure. Cur­rently static out­put files are hosted at Github pages and op­tional PDF files are in Drop­box's pub­lic folder (HTTP 302 redi­rected from a mi­cro AWS in­stance at cdn.nikonyrh.org).

As a brief note about my ca­reer, I joined Anal­yse²'s Analytics Team in April 2014 where we (a few doctors and masters) focus on predictive modeling of product sales volumes of hundreds of thousands of products in thousands of stores. It has been a great opportunity to collaborate with other smart people, build PoC infrastructure and see it grow from internal test environment to production, introducing new tech to make our lives easier and scaling peak computational needs to Amazon Web Services with PySpark.

Be­tween 2010 and 2013 I spent two years in Sin­ga­pore: had a stu­dent ex­change pro­gram at the Na­tional Uni­ver­sity of Sin­ga­pore, and an in­tern­ship and full time po­si­tion at Prop­er­tyGuru. Ini­tially my main role was a PHP & MySQL de­vel­oper, but later it evolved to data anal­ysis in a newly formed team. The main fo­cus was on an au­to­mated prop­erty val­ua­tion al­go­rithm and to make it avail­able at REST­ful API. It might still be pub­licly vis­ible at api.prop­er­tyguru.com (/v1/prop­er­ties/[id]/val­ua­tion/...), but nat­urally queries aren't ac­cepted with­out valid OAuth au­then­ti­ca­tion.

I hope to keep this blog rea­son­ably ac­tive, but not all my pro­jects are worth the ef­fort of ac­tu­ally writ­ing an ar­ti­cle out of them. Some are just small steps to­wards a greater long-term goal.

LinkedIn: Niko Nyrhilä
GitHub: NikoNyrh
Stack­Ex­change: nikonyrh