Seán Healy


A to Z

Experience

Oct 2021–Present

PhD Candidate, ADAPT Centre

Nov 2020–Oct 2021

Software developer, EdgeTier
  1. At EdgeTier I primary worked on fulltext search and indexing. In the process, I gained a deep understanding of PostgreSQL, along with Python search and ORM libraries.
  2. I also contributed heavily towards the abstraction of EdgeTier's backend system in order to better suit a multi-tenanted architecture. This is a direction any SaaS company must take in order to speed up the onboarding of new clients.

Apr 2019–Nov 2020

Full-stack software engineer, VSware (acquired by Visma)
  1. I improved several data-intensive endpoints, including InSchool’s roll call and absence registration pages. These pages are used by teachers across the Norwegian public secondary school system (taking roll call with a tablet or computer). My enhancements, taking load times from multiple seconds to milliseconds in many cases, has at this stage saved Norwegian teachers days of buffering time at the beginning of class.
  2. I was the bash and regex guy in the office, often tasked with writing scripts to modify huge portions of code, automate tedious tasks, or enforce a coding standard rule across different languages. I led the charge in transitioning date and time standards used within Visma’s InSchool project to ISO-8601. This involved huge collaboration across teams.

Nov 2018–Apr 2019

Software engineer, Datalex
  1. I worked on the airline pricing team, and wrote a web crawler to download, index, and cluster pricing rule documentation (tens of thousands of pages of legalese text). This aided other software engineers in retrieving important information, and recognising related yet vague terms such as ’Category 4 fare’ and ’Record 3’.
  2. I pointed out issues with a deletion procedure on the Linux servers used by the pricing team. The Linux kernel keeps an unlisted copy of a deleted file until every program reading that file has closed it. For months, Datalex’s QA servers kept running out of disk space, despite deletion procedures in place to remove old files. My Linux knowledge got to the bottom of this unexplainable bug.

Oct 2017–Oct 2018

Full-stack software developer, Webio
  1. I improved Webio’s underlying REST API’s readability and maintainability, measured by a 40% reduction in lines of code, by introducing object orientation and static utility functions in areas with code repetition.
  2. I increased sales to new clients by rapidly creating high-demand features. I successfully oversaw the creation, for example, of a smart reply feature, a versioning system for Webio’s core functionality (the bots creation page), and more mission critical features like the ability for human agents to easily intervene in a conversation handled by a poorly performing bot.

Education

ADAPT Centre @ Dublin City University

PhD (ongoing) Responsible AI in Personalised IR

Trinity College Dublin

MPhil in Speech and Language Processing

My dissertation covered privacy-oriented news aggregration.

Final grade: Distinction

BA in Computer Science, Linguistics and French, first-class honours

Coursework focused strongly on machine learning for natural language processing. I also took many traditionally CS and linguistics modules.

Final grade: First-class honours (distinction in spoken French)

Clubs and societies: Rowing (DUBC), internet society (netsoc), student journalism

Université Paris Diderot (now Université de Paris)

Erasmus student in informatique linguistique (computational linguistics). Classes and assignments were through French. This placement was over the course of one academic year, as part of my undergraduate degree.

Portmarnock Community School

Leaving Certificate (590/625 points).

Technologies

Highly skilled Java, JavaScript, SQL, C, Python, Bash, Linux, Redis
Moderately skilled Perl, R, SQLite

Languages

English First language
French Professional working proficiency
Irish Good reading and listening.

References

“Seán is a self directed learner who sets the highest standards for himself and others. Very focused, very motivated, and an excellent developer. He makes the difference because he goes the distance. There is no mountain he will not climb. We had a lot of mountains.”

  1. Quote by Paul Sweeney
    EVP of Product at Webio, Co-founder of ConverCon
  2. David Power
    Technical Team Lead at Webio
  3. Dr. Tim Fernando
    Lecturer and undergraduate dissertation supervisor