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David Branner

David Branner

Technical Writer

Followers of David Branner528 followers
location of David BrannerNew York, New York, United States

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  • Timeline

  • About me

    Philologist of Chinese

  • Education

    • City College of New York

      -
      Computer Science

      Activities and Societies: Association for Computing Machinery (secretary of local chapter, 2011-12) Minor in Computer Science

    • Recurse Center

      2013 - 2014
      Computer Programming, Specific Applications

      (formerly Hacker School) * Independent coding projects using Python, SQL, JavaScript, LaTeX, and various libraries and frameworks for these languages. Topics of these projects include - Evaluating Weather Forecasts: For a given date and location, how do weather forecasts change as the date gets nearer and nearer? Python 3+, SQL, Matplotlib, D3. - Regex Blaster: arcade game to let user practice writing regular expressions. Python 2.7-3+, Ncurses. - Index Git: A… Show more (formerly Hacker School) * Independent coding projects using Python, SQL, JavaScript, LaTeX, and various libraries and frameworks for these languages. Topics of these projects include - Evaluating Weather Forecasts: For a given date and location, how do weather forecasts change as the date gets nearer and nearer? Python 3+, SQL, Matplotlib, D3. - Regex Blaster: arcade game to let user practice writing regular expressions. Python 2.7-3+, Ncurses. - Index Git: A Python script indexes the headers and titles of all files in the repository; the index is accessed through JavaScript in the browser. Python, NLTK, JavaScript. - a Natural-Language-based URL-shortener - web-scraping and analysis of Chinese text - anagram manipulation - implementing various algorithms and data structures for self study, including a hash table from scratch and the Knuth-Morris-Pratt sequence-matching algorithm * Pair programming * Code review Show less

    • University of Washington

      -
      Asian Linguistics

    • Columbia University in the City of New York

      -
      Chinese

  • Experience

    • Freelancing

      Aug 1991 - Jun 2019
      Technical Writer

      Writing and editing software documentation for private clients. Installation notes, working examples, READMEs, debugging advice — for internal and external developers. User documentation, automated testing.

    • University of Maryland

      Jan 2000 - Jan 2008
      Associate Professor

      Tenured professor (early tenure, 2004), Dept. of Asian and East European Languages. Director, Chinese Language and Literature. Designing undergraduate academic curriculum; designing MA program in Chinese teacher-training; liaising with units and partners across University, U.S. Government agencies, the community; advising students; supervising student independent research and student internships in my own research projects; budget and grants; hiring and supervising 8 faculty, serving 700 students. Scholarly publications during these years included three books; six book chapters and articles; four peer-reviewed single-author articles. Show less

    • Columbia University

      Jan 2007 - Jan 2014
      Adjunct Professor

      Teaching graduate and undergraduate courses with original syllabuses in Chinese and Linguistics programs.

    • Meaningful Machines

      Jan 2008 - Jan 2009
      Director of Chinese Lexicography

      • adapted Chinese syntactic analysis for application to machine translation • planned all lexicographic workflows, including design of GUI for use by researchers • hired and supervised a team of 10 Chinese-English bilingual lexicographers

    • Institute for Advanced Study

      Jan 2013 - Jan 2013
      Member

      Computational study of traditional Chinese literature.

    • MediaMath

      Jan 2014 - Oct 2015
      Software Test Engineer II

      I worked mainly in the Intelligence squad, whose projects deal with identifying Internet users across multiple devices. * Writing original Python frameworks to challenge the behavior of Scala, Node, and C++ production code. * Refactoring legacy code. * Teaching Python classes to other engineers. * Automating the archiving of test output and documentation. * Technical writing and editing.

    • Recurse Center

      Jan 2015 - Jan 2017
      HR Consulting Engineer (contract)

      Performing code-reviews and live-coding screenings of software developers seeking engineering positions (various languages). Based on this work and on conversations with the applicants, wrote a summary evaluation of the applicant's various qualities as a programmer. Conducted eight hundred twenty-three technical interviews in two years in this position.

    • Kaplan

      Nov 2015 - Mar 2016
      Instructor at Dev Bootcamp

      I teach full-stack Ruby-centered programming with emphasis on program-design, including data structures and algorithms.Software development roles include optimizing internal technology products and working on open-source projects.My other pedagogical roles include curriculum-revision, technical mentorship of other instructors, facilitating public workshops on advanced topics and the technical portion of Career Week.Dev Bootcamp is part of Kaplan's New Economy Skills Training program. Show less

    • Consulting

      Jan 2017 - Jun 2019
      Technical Documentation Writer

      Writing and editing of academic research papers. Documentation of internal codebases for in-house data science workers. Development and maintenance of resources for self-study of Python by experienced programmers or financial modelers. (Sphinx, Python, PySpark, Pandas)

    • Gerundivist LLC

      Jun 2019 - now
      Philologist of Chinese

      Translation and commentary on pre-modern Chinese texts. Exposition of technical tools for the study of Chinese language.

  • Licenses & Certifications

    • Licensed Private Career School Teacher (NY State)

      New York State Education Department

  • Honors & Awards

    • Awarded to David Branner
      Elected Fellow Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2003

  • Volunteer Experience

    • Co-Founder and Organizer

      Issued by DataRave Meetup on Feb 2014
      DataRave MeetupAssociated with David Branner

    • Associate Editor and Member of Board of Directors

      Issued by American Oriental Society on Jan 2006
      American Oriental SocietyAssociated with David Branner

    • Member, Board of Directors

      Issued by International Linguistic Association (formerly the NY Linguistic Circle) on Jan 2009
      International Linguistic Association (formerly the NY Linguistic Circle)Associated with David Branner

    • Alumni Reviewer

      Issued by Recurse Center on Jan 2013
      Recurse CenterAssociated with David Branner