Max Held

I am a data scientist and software engineer with five years of experience in research, consulting and freelance development.

I have build data products using the tidyverse and r-lib libraries, functional programming, data visualisation (ggplot2, plotly, htmlwidgets and interactivity (shiny)). Throughout, I have focused on bringing software development best practices to reproducible science, using defensive programming, test-driven development, CI/CD (Travis, now migrating to Docker and GitHub Actions) and source control management (git, GitHub).

I am particularly interested in DataOps and CI/CD (around Docker), exploratory and bayesian analyses, visualization and unsupervised learning.

My deepest expertise is in the R ecosystem, Linux and docker, but I also have a working knowledge of web frontend technologies (HTML5, CSS, JavaScript) as well as Python. I am not interested in working with proprietary stacks (especially SAS, Tableau, Power BI).

I have built several visually rich reports, fully reproducible on every commit from the raw data and build environment down to the final HTML assets. I am also developing an R package for a specialised survey method (including an S3 scheme and extensive input validation), have contributed to existing R packages and have built a prototype shiny application for an industry customer. I have also taught several courses on R and data science.

My resume is at http://www.maxheld.de/cv/held_resume.pdf and you can find more information at http://www.maxheld.de and my GitHub profile.

Though not a computer scientist by training, I have come to love just building something that saves another human being a lot of time, or perhaps, even serves her in solving an important problem.

I have also learned (the hard way) that software development, in R as elsewhere, is not without risks. I work best when I understand the users needs well, and can break it down into small, modular, and well-tested pieces. This requires a lot of focus and "saying no" (mostly to oneself).