Anthony Wu anthonywu

About Me

For over 20 years, everything I touch at work, I ship!

Early career: Eng at YouTube during early scale up years at Google.
Co-Founder and CTO at LearnSprout, a Python data company acquired by Apple in 2016.
4+ years embedded with an org of math/physics PhDs helping with their software and infrastructure.

With a strong belief in action begets information and always working with a sense of urgency, I help my teams compete and win.

My engineering philosophy is centered around agility: plan and execute in short cycles of hours or days.

With rapid iteration and feedback loops, I help small and young teams minimize "worked on the wrong thing" risk.

Currently

🏝️ Enjoying a sabbatical from full time work after continuously working since 2004
✈️ Based in San Francisco, but frequently traveling
👨🏻‍💻 Contributing to OSS after a ~9 year OSS hiatus due to working at  Big Fruit Inc
✨ Evaluating every AI-assisted CLI and IDE available to find their strengths
🌟 Frequently starring, cloning, and contributing to repos w/Python, GenAI, LLM and Local-First software stacks

Open to Opportunities

🤝🏼 Advisory: Hourly fee. Video or SF in-person. Technical due diligence, architecture/code reviews, eng team building/hiring
💼 Consulting: Project-based pricing. Python/AI app architecture, AI/ML workflow
🛠️ Fractional Engineer: Early-stage startups needing technical leadership
🏢 Full Time: Only considering extremely good fits. Happy to explore.
🚀 Co-Founder Opportunities: Also seeking only extremely good fits. If we have mutuals, lets chat!

Ideal Projects

👨🏼‍🏫 Video or on-site training, limited scope and time engagement.
🏗️ Startups needing fractional CTO/VPE leadership, i.e. bootstrap good practices into engineering cultures
🔧 Companies modernizing infrastructure, i.e. upgrade runtimes, packaging and deploying into cloud services
🚀 Teams building GenAI/LLM applications, i.e. technology selection, planning and scoping

📫 DM @ X Messages or LinkedIn

🏆 Notable Achievements

Co-Founder/CTO of LearnSprout – Startup with Successful Exit: Acquired by Apple in 2015
- all team members hired
- transfered tech into production, no re-writes
📚 Apple Education Software: If your children uses Apple in Education, you are using software that originated from my house.
🗺️ Apple Maps: If you think Apple Maps has gotten better since 2019, I helped.
🐍 Python Champion: Championed Python as first-class programming language at Apple (2015-2024).
📺 YouTube: Engineered compliance systems. Earning Google OC Award for technical work relating to Viacom v. YouTube

Brief History of Work

⌛️	📄 ➡ click each item to expand details
2019-2024	 Apple, Software Engineer, Staff / ICT5 Role: Lone SWE reporting to a Data Science org. Bridged the notebook/sql → ops chasm between data exploration and production. Helped shape rotators ship their analysis as the $f'(t)$ to their $f(t)$. Impact: Supported a big org of Apple Maps Eval Data Scientists with my experience in building app/services, owning end-to-end dev-ops and production. Tools: Solved problems and automated workflows with: Git CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, Spark, Hadoop, Python 3, pandas, Jupyter and a wide variety of tools from the Python data ecosystem. Ownership: Creator of one of the most widely used and fully featured notebook services at Apple (competed with centralized company-wide service). Side quest: Make Python Good at Apple. Active member of community in company-wide Python chat rooms and helped maintain company-wide CI builders and cloud integration for Python Setuptools, Poetry and Hatch builders.
2015-2019	 Apple, Software Engineer, Staff / ICT5 Role: Founding Engineer + Principal of project. Performance Management: 🌅 and 🏙, coding, mentoring, hiring and keeping a happy team that delivered. Cloud Migration: Lifted/migrated acquired AWS Linux/Python tech stack into Apple internal data centers. Speed: Re-launched publicly in first year. Navigated Apple culture and organizations. Recognition: Promoted to SWE ICT5. Product Scope: My team launched and supports: Apple School Manager / Student Information System integration ClassKit Framework Schoolwork iOS app Unintended side quest: Helped define requirements for hosting Python a first class language at Apple - which, until then, required high friction for hosting cloud-native and full-stack Python apps in a sea of Objective C, and On Premise Enterprise Java.
2011-2015	🌱 LearnSprout, Co-Founder & CTO LearnSprout was an education technology company that provided recommendations and analysis on student data. Our products were used by thousands of K-12 schools globally. Investors, Mentors & Supporters: Formation8 / a16z/ Samsung Ventures / ImagineK12 Winter 2012 / Code for America Accelerator Summer 2012 / Wharton Social Venture Fund: 2013 Personal Growth: building this company, I at least 5X'ed my technical scope of knowledge since leaving Google Full Stack Ownership: IC and tech lead on Python app stack of nginx, uwsgi, flask/bottle, celery, requests lib and many others Hiring/Mentoring: hired and personally onboarded new and recent college graduates Engineering Productivity: reproducible dev and prod envs with Docker & Hashicorp Terraform/Packer/Vagrant. Used VM, LXC and Docker-based developer sandboxes and containers Cloud Vendors: deployed on AWS & Rackspace, used IaaS, PaaS, cloud functions and static-site deployment strategies AWS: extensive use of AWS EC2, VPC, S3, SNS, SQS, RDS, ElastiCache, IAM, CodeDeploy Security: set up security namespaces for apps and envs with well-scoped IAM users/roles and policies SRE: set up SSL/HTTPS certs, gateways and reverse proxies using AWS Route53, CloudFlare, various registrars SysAdmin: built and deployed apps across Debian and RedHat variants of Linux, but particularly fond of Ubuntu distro Frontend: evolving variety of contemporary frontend workflows, inclusive of JS, CoffeeScript, ES6, Webpack, and npm Debugging: client-side debugging with Firebug, Chrome DevTools, Postman and pass through proxies towards RESTful API backend Databases: MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB Analytics: tweaked analytics backend with query optimization and stored procedures CI/CD Automation: automated testing in git-flow pipelines Browser Agents and Automation: html/csv/json/xml text processing with BeautifulSoup, lxml, csvkit, etc Observability: integrated with SaaS products in logging, app metrics, and dev-ops monitoring (e.g. NewRelic, PagerDuty) Pager Duty: owned or participated in all other kinds of dev-ops grunt work Founder-glamour work: kitchen cleaning and trash duty
2008-2011	▶️ YouTube / Google, Software Engineer Tech Lead Role: My dev work was roughly 80% backend, 20% frontend, along with Tech Lead (TL) responsibilities for other engineers, interns, and remote (Ukraine) contractors. While not writing code: Design & code reviews (Tech Lead of 3-8 member eng teams, 2010-2011) Participate in project planning and prioritization re: content policies and enforcement Hosting & mentoring engineering interns, all joining as FTE after internship Misc Big Company duties (interviews, etc) Ownership: Eng DRI for large swaths of the workflows for enforcing terms of service and legal compliance - interacting directly with YouTube General Counsel. I created tools that are used by human and machine reviewers to keep up with the stream of user reports, with the goal of maximizing decision accuracy. Tech: Frontend + backend application development on LAMP stack (Linux, MySQL, Python) and internal Google infrastructure. Wrote code at every layer: Shell scripts (deployment, monitoring, analytics) MySQL & Google Bigtable (schema creation, query optimizations, on-demand queries) Workflows for automated and human review Servlets & Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX/JSON, Firebug Recognitiom: Google OC Award for performing engineering due diligence relating to Viacom v. YouTube Inc.
2005-2008	Varolii, Software Engineer, Services / Forward Deployment, company later acquired by Nuance then Microsoft Role: Served as Software Engineer and Solutions Architect for major enterprise accounts on the Professional Services team. Primarily responsible for design, implementation, release, and post-production support. Sometimes I follow the sales reps on trips as engineering representative so I can go listen to potential and whale customers about what they really want. Tech: Built client-facing integrations for clients in {pharmacy, banking, insurance, utility} industries, with Java, Oracle, Solaris, IBM and also open source technologies. Complete ownership to build, test, and release to production. Provide and defend cost and effort work order estimates to clients. Pager Duty: Serve as production support escalation contact. Remote collaboration: Provided technical and project training to paired offshore development team (visited team in Bangalore) Moment of Clarity: Spent too much time of my life doing custom work, vowed to never suffer custom work ever again. Platform-everything, API-everything, modularize and share all the reasonable things from this point on.
2004-2005	Intel, Software Engineer Intern Duration: 6 month co-op Role: Primary application front-end developer for internal tool that tracks project dependencies for hardware in the R&D pipeline. From initial conception to product marketing, this tool allows all internal participants of projects to have a bird's eye view of progression. Platform: Windows, Visual Studio, .NET, C# Moment of Clarity: In hindsight, we were re-inventing Excel.

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Anthony Wu anthonywu

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