Nick Ortakales

Programmer, techie, gamer, gearhead, father

• Projects
• Resumé
• Misc Other

Projects

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Cider Nerd hard cider ratings/reviews website

Cider is a favorite drink of mine. Over the years I kept a spreadsheet to track the hundreds of different ciders I was trying. Eventually I built this website to track it all more efficiently. It's open for anyone to use, check it out!

Cider Nerd

Tonight's Noms specially curated recipes

During the Covid pandemic, my wife's cooking really took off. I noticed a problem though, her recipes were scattered everywhere. Pinterest, old Hello Fresh cards, original recipes in her head, and a few recipes that had even disappeared from Pinterest and were lost to the ether. I solved this problem the best way I knew how. I built her a website that let's her easily upload her recipes and share them with everyone we know. It's a wonderful curation of the food we love.

Tonight's Noms

Nick's List a collection of my best purchases

This list is a curation of the best, clever, time saving, useful, unique, convenient things I have ever purchased, all in one list. It's like if BuzzFeed gave you a list of things that they actually tried, and were actually useful. I've personally purchased, with my own money, every thing on this list, and would personally recommend everything here.

Nick's List

Qalc a VSCode extension

Qalc is an interactive calculator that turns any text document into a math processor. Quickly and easily run simple or complex calculations naturally. Lightweight, powerful, simple. Inspired by Numi and Parsify.

VSCode Marketplace
GitHub

Pokémon x Girls Who Code Fundraiser catching them all to raise money

A nostalgia fueled attempt at raising some money for a good cause and having fun at the same time. The idea is to raise money for each Pokémon I'm able to catch in the Gen1/Gen2 games in the timeframe of 1 year.

Fundraiser Updates

Cron Lambdas personal automation

A collection of scheduled automations that perform various repetitive tasks, or provide notifications. Weekly email with a list of new comics. Customized weather notifications. Notification when new autocross events are posted. Price and retirement tracking for LEGO sets. All built on AWS using CDK.

GitHub

GB Palette Editor multi-format Game Boy color palette editor

There was no fully-featured palette editor on the internet, so I built one that combines features from many editors. It can edit and convert to/from .gbp and .pal formats. Quickly invert the colors, or copy the background color to each of the other palettes. Mobile-ready with a responsive layout.

GB Palette Editor

Flipper Zero Syntax Highlighting a VSCode extension

VSCode extension that provides syntax highlighting for various Flipper Zero file formats like .ir, .sub, .nfc, .rfid, etc.

VSCode Marketplace
GitHub

Date Hover Preview a VSCode extension

Hover over a string in any document that represents a date, and get a small preview that converts that date to a configurable set of timezones and formats.

VSCode Marketplace
GitHub

Resumé

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PDF version | Email | LinkedIn

Senior software engineer with over 12 years of experience at Amazon designing and building large scale, high throughput, distributed systems across a variety of business domains. Java and AWS expert with full stack experience.

Skills

Experience

Amazon 2011-present

Senior full stack engineer primarily building and maintaining backend Java services and web-based user interfaces for Dash Replenishment, Buy Box Qualification, and Buyer/Seller Communication.

Software Development Engineer III
Apr 2023 - present

Dash Replenishment

• Built and currently maintain Dash Replenishment, a set of Alexa Smart Home APIs that allow device manufacturers to report levels or usage of consumables associated with a device so Amazon can automatically place orders for the end customer.
• Built the auto-replenishment features that are part of the Amazon Basics Microwave, Dash Smart Shelf, Amazon Smart Soap Dispenser, and Amazon Smart Thermostat.
• These services currently process 190 million events (inventory levels, consumption events, restock events) per day and run 70 million evaluations (to determine when to place an order) per day for roughly 140 million connected devices.
• Owned the Dash Button and legacy Dash Replenishment APIs (now retired).
• Still own and maintain Alexa Print (see below).

Software Development Engineer II
Oct 2013 - Apr 2023

• Alexa Print - just say to your Echo, "Alexa, print a sudoku" (you'll need a printer connected to your Echo first - try "Alexa, find my printer"). Designed the architecture, and led a team of developers to build this feature within the existing Alexa ecosystem. Prototyped, scoped and planned project from end to end. Worked closely with the Amazon Smart Sticky Note Printer team to support their device. Built a variety of first party content like shopping lists, sudoku, mazes and graph paper, as well as support for third party content through skill connections like crosswords and recipes.
• Seller Feedback - maintained CRUD storage and calculation of third party sellers' 5-star rating.
• TREx - designed, built and maintained an A/B style experimentation platform that enabled internal customers to test the performance of treatment groups against a control group.
• Buy Box Qualification - built and maintained a system to evaluate and trigger action against third party sellers with high order defect rates by running over 60 million ruleset evaluations per day against aggregated upstream data. Also built and maintained a corresponding Seller Central UI widget, which gave sellers visibility into their data used for evaluations, and leveraged backend rules to keep evaluation and display logic in sync.

Software Development Engineer I
Aug 2011 - Oct 2013

• Buyer/Seller Communication - maintained and built new features for a proxy email system that processed over 14 million customer emails per day while protecting both buyers and sellers from various attack vectors. Maintained the end-to-end email processing workflow, and the Amazon.com and Seller Central messaging user interfaces.

Fidelity Investments 2010-2011

Associate Software Developer

• Developed a streaming stock ticker for Active Trader Browser Tools, using C# and Silverlight.
• As a fresh college graduate, trained in Fidelity’s “Leap” program which provided 6 months of training from industry experts before placement in a permanent role.

Education

Plymouth State University 2006-2010

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
• Mathematics Minor

Interests

At work - accelerating development cycles with continuous deployment and infrastructure as code, building custom internal tools that assist in data inspection and debugging to help develop and debug faster, hacking on IDE extensions

At home - retro video games, comic books, LEGO, building custom mechanical keyboards, racing and modifying MINI Coopers, cider, woodworking

Misc Other

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• Lost - Narrative Chart - a long abandoned project inspired by the xkcd narrative charts
• AmphicarVentures - an old site I built to feature my dad's 1967 Amphicar
• iTunes Explorer - an old project I need to revitalize. It displays stats based on your iTunes library, like how long you've listened to a particular artist, or how many skips you have per genre, or the total listen time across your entire library, etc. A bunch of stats for nerds that Apple should show you, but doesn't.