Hi, my name is SengMing Tan and I am available for contract work.
I spent some time at the Recurse Center, a retreat for programmers. If you’re into programming you should definitely check it out!
Right before that I spent a few years making a dent in condo management software with Evercondo.
I used to work for Blake eLearning, the people who’ve brought you Reading Eggs and Mathseeds.
Before that I was freelancing as a Rails developer and built BilPlz (rocking your finances one receipt at a time), DayDeed (helping friends solve problems) and Highrise Pro (disrupting property management). I tend to work Agile. Meaning that I develop in pairs, write a lot of tests, build on stories, work with short iterations, forecast using yesterday’s weather etc.
Before that I’ve worked on semantic web middleware, built web applications for yield reporting & analysis and designed microprocessors for Intel.
I’m looking to delightful software for the Internet. Preferably with small teams that are Rails and JavaScript heavy.
I graduated from Iowa State University.
I have a résumé and a Linkedin account.
If anything here catches your fancy, feel free to contact me on sengming [at] sanemen dot com or Twitter.
Portfolio
MakanPages (2011)
The project involved analyzing hundreds of food blogs to figure out where people liked to eat. The text extraction and sentiment analysis libraries were built from scratch. It was constructed with Rails and MongoDB on AWS. Link »
Semantic Widgets for The Star Online (2010)
While at Knorex, we built a stock watcher, article discovery tool and other data based widgets for Malaysia’s largest English newspaper. We supported millions of hits everyday by leaning heavily on Varnish and HTTP load testing. Built with jQuery on a REST backend made from Glassfish and MySQL. Link »
Manufacturing Yield and Machine Analysis (2009)
For Freescale Semiconductors I build an application to report and analyze millions of micro-controller test results every month. It also analyzed lot equipment history to detect equipment failures using statistical tests. The main challenge was working with the myriad of data sources and optimizing the analysis to handle the data load. Built with Rails and MySQL with R for statistical work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do you do and how long have you been doing it? I am a full stack Rails developer, meaning that I’ve optimized the servers (Apache, Glassfish, Varnish), tuned databases (MySQL) and written application (Ruby, Java) & front end (jQuery, HTML, CSS) code. That said, I’d rather work mostly on application code. I shipped my first Rails application on 2007 (a tiny little app to manage newsletters).
What projects have you worked on? I’ve worked in manufacturing, building a defect reporting & analysis tool. In finance, building stock readers for the bursa feed and tools to manage stock information. I’ve also worked on Semantic Technologies and data integration while at Knorex.
What languages have you worked with? I work mostly with Ruby but have been known to ship products in jQuery, Java and PHP.