I’m Alex Axthelm. this is my space on the internet.
You can also find me at:
Current Work
Professionally, I’m a software engineer, with a history of helping small teams move their data science pipelines along the Software Development lifecycle.
Currently, I do DevOps, System Design, and some data engineering for the PACTA project at RMI. Most of my day is some combination of R, shell programming (generally POSIX compliant), with a bit of SQL thrown in for fun.
Some of the interesting work I’ve been doing there (all ongoing, and in-progress):
- actions A collection of reusable Github workflows, mostly centered around R package maitenence, and building docker images that run R packages.
- A collection of R packages that orchestrate our anaysis pipeline, and the docker containers that wrap them.
- factset_data_loader (shell-only) A docker image to run FactSet’s
FDSLoader64application, and handle some basic DB maitenence (restore from last backup, dump a new backup after loading). Comes with an Azure Deploy template for quick setup of container instance and a PostgreSQL server.
Past Work
Previously I worked for the Indiana Commission for Higher Education in a mixed role where I did data analysis supporting policy decisions, built dashboards, maintained our longitudinal database, and led a small development team in improving and maintaining a webapp that met FERPA standards. In that role, I also introduced and championed a transition to Agile methodolgies.
After that, I worked with a contractor for the US Department of Health and Human Services on the Quality Payment Program as a data engineer. In that role, I was able to establish a containerized development environment, and implemented a transition from PostgreSQL databases to Amazon Redshift.
Current interests
- Abstraction
- Services
- OOP
- Validation
- JSON Schema
- Reproducibility
- Docker