Luke Scales

This degree was the first fully online, fully accredited degree to be provided by DCU. It was a part-time, 2-year M.Sc that was partly funded by the Technology Ireland ICT Skillnet programme.

I excelled at this course, finishing in the top 10 of my class and coming first overall in the Machine Learning module - a module which was shared with multiple other classes including 2 PhD streams.

Notable Results:

Overall Result: Second Class Honours Grade I (2.1)

Notable Modules:

Mechatronic Engineering is an interesting field which combines mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and software engineering into one disctinct discipline.

The aim of this degree is to develop its students into engineers that are capable of working in any role within the robotics industry. However, due to the broad nature of the course, graduates can be found in varying roles across all industries. Personally, I began to specialise in software in the latter half of my studies. Taking time out from my degree gave me an opportunity to improve upon my software skills before graduation, which allowed me to achieve more technology-focused goals when I returned to DCU in 2016.

---

Click here to see my achievements

Achievements

Urban Art Society

In 2012 I founded the DCU Urban Art Society: a society which focuses on street art and street culture while promoting and supporting all forms of urban art. I lead this society for 3 years and it was hailed as one of the fastest growing societies on campus, growing from 30 members in its first year to over 300 the following year (the average society in DCU has under 100 members). During my tenure we supported and collaborated with societies on campus with nobler goals, such as DCU's Mental Health Society, Animal Welfare Society, and DCU's "RAG" (Raising & Giving) Society.

Photo and paintings by PichiAvo.

My work with this society helped me to gain experience in many areas:

• Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator - through designing the society's logo and making posters.
• Event Management & Planning - from organising weekly tutorials and small socials to planning and executing events for over 600 students on campus and trips abroad for 20-30 students.
• Email Marketing - from writing and designing weekly emails, to performing A/B testing and implementing services such as Google Analytics and Mailchimp, this society gave me some great experience with email marketing.
• Leadership - running this society gave me an opportunity to practice and refine my leadership skills and methodologies.

Quota Clothing

A side hustle I had been running for about a year previously, in 2014 I decided I would progress my t-shirt making gig by branding it. I began designing logos and researching branding, while exploring how to order hoodies and other garments from manufacturers overseas.

From setting up stalls at events and music festivals in Ireland, to designing and ordering hoodies for societies at DCU, this became a great way to bolster my income throughout my studies. It was also a great learning opportunity, where I gained experience in:

• Branding & Logo Design
• Entrepreneurship
• Supply Chain Management
• Shipping & Procurement
• Social Media Marketing

UStart

UStart is the DCU Ryan Academy for Entrepreneur's student startup accelerator programme. The accelerator provides funding and mentorship to help propel the startup's progress. I was awarded a place on this programme twice: with my clothing company Quota in 2014 and then again in 2016 with a startup called Hitch. From my pitch at the UStart Demo Day in 2016, we were awarded as the "Most Innovative" of the cohort.

Hackathons

Hackathons were a fantastic way to improve my programming and pitching skills over the course of a weekend in university. From partaking in hackathons I developed my Android and web development skills whilst also gaining further experience with pitching/presenting, project management, team leadership, and collaboration. The following are the highlights of the hackathons that I participated in.

HackDCU 2.0 - March, 2016

HackDCU 2.0 aimed to produce ideas that could improve the life of students at DCU. Our winning team, "Hitch", proposed developing an app for organising carpooling on campus. From winning this hackathon we were awarded an all-expenses paid trip to SpaceHack in Berlin, Germany (featured below, as well as €1000.

SpaceHack - June, 2016

The focus of SpaceHack was to develop solutions to the issues faced by refugees. These could be issues that refugees face at any stage of their journey, from leaving their home country to arriving and integrating with their new country. I delivered the winning pitch for "BureauCrazy", an app which removes some of the bureaucracy that refugees deal with in Germany. In particular, the aplication helps incoming refugees to fill out the many forms that the German authorities request from them, which were all (at least at the time of the event) only provided in the German language.

New Ireland Hackathon - November, 2016

The New Ireland hackathon was an event intending to produce innovative ways to make pensions, savings and life assurance more appealing to millenials. Our team, "HarvestCoin", came in second place and was awarded €1000.

---

When I was halfway through my third year, in 2014, I had to take two years out of my degree to work full time and help support my family. Before I left I began learning Android by undertaking a simple Android project with Dr. Bryan MacDonald, Associate Professor of DCU. During my time out from my degree I continued to improve upon my programming ability and I was awarded a scholarship for the Udacity Android Developer Nanodegree. This further propelled my capabilities as an Android developer.

Upon returning to DCU in 2016, I had a newfound sense of determination and maturity. I came first in my class in some subjects (such as the Continuous Assessment elements of Image Processing & Analysis) and finished in the top 3 for most others. I proposed my own topic for my "Final Year Project" (FYP), of which Dr. Bryan MacDonald thankfully accepted to be my Project Supervisor. This project presented a novel take on the typical calorie-counting/diet-management application, applying Machine Learning-based image classification and a Bluetooth Low Energy kitchen scale to enhance the User Experience of these apps. You can read the report I wrote for this project and find a link to the repository on Github in the "Past Projects" section below; click here to skip the rest of the "Education" & "Work Experience" sections and get straight to the goods!

The agri-food sector struggles with data silos and lack of transparency. Stocky AI is a company that aims to solve this problem by providing a platform for buyers and sellers across the globe to connect and streamline their transactions.

Duties Include:

• Customer discovery and problem validation.
• Sales & customer support.
• Architecting, planning, documenting, and developing core features for our clients.
• Designing and implementing AI systems.

As a freelance engineer, I worked with mutliple different clients: Burh Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, as their Lead Engineer (stack = Python, FastAPI, React, Redux, TypeScript, Postgres, Docker); with Xelda in Dublin, Ireland as a Senior Full Stack Engineer but mostly focused on the backend (stack = Python, Django, Celery, Redis, React, Redux, TypeScript, Postgres, Docker); and with CivImpact Labs in San Francisco, USA, as a Senior Full Stack Engineer (stack = Python, Django, Celery, React, Redux, JavaScript, Postgres, Redis, Elixir, Docker).

Duties Included:

• Architecting, planning, documenting, and developing core features for the clients.
• Mentoring junior- to mid-level engineers at Xelda.
• Participating in code reviews, driving the adoption of best practices and SOLID principles.
• DevOps tasks such as Dockerizing existing applications.
• Stakeholder management

I was promoted to Senior and transitioned to the Nory Inventory Management team to improve the team's engineering standards and to mentor the engineers on this newer, junior-heavy team, while solving their toughest technical challenges.

Duties Included:

• Mentoring junior- to mid-level engineers.
• Architecting, planning, and documenting the development and maintenance of Nory's core services and infrastructure.
• Participating in code reviews, driving the adoption of best practices and SOLID principles.
• Planning and executing on the migration of legacy systems.

Duties Included:

• Delivering on Nory's product and company roadmaps.
• Developing and maintaining Nory's proprietary algorithms and its machine learning and statistical forecasting models.
• Developing Python code for Nory's backend systems as well as frontend code using Typescript and React.
• The provision and maintenance of cloud resources on AWS.
• Research and development of novel software algorithms for complex resource management problems.
• Participating in code reviews and system design meetings

Recommendations:

Raph Estrada - Head of Engineering at Nory

Luke was one of Nory's first engineers - when I met him, he had already helped build the foundations for two product modules and was working on our third. Luke's passion for quality, attention to detail and his desire to constantly improve things really stood out. Luke always had time for other engineers, to help them learn and grow and arrive at a better solution together. He's hungry for impact, ready to go the extra mile, and a strong addition to any engineering team.

Mohan Sai - Engineering Manager at Nory

I've had the distinct pleasure of working closely with Luke over the past three years at Nory, and his contributions have been nothing short of exceptional. From the moment he joined as our second engineer, it was clear that Luke was a unique talent. His prowess in product building, machine learning, and software architecture has been pivotal in scaling our product from its infancy to the robust platform it is today.

What sets Luke apart, even more than his technical acumen, is his unwavering commitment to quality and the trustworthiness he brings to the table. In the often tumultuous world of start-ups, having someone like Luke on your side - who consistently delivers, who you can trust implicitly, and who never sacrifices quality for expediency - is invaluable.

For anyone considering Luke for future endeavors, know that you're not just getting an engineer; you're getting a forward-thinking architect, a reliable partner, and a genuine asset to any team. I wholeheartedly recommend him and am confident that he'll exceed expectations in any endeavor.

Duties Included:

• Rewriting Traction Complete's web app using modern frontend technology and the latest JavaScript developments.
• Ongoing addition of features to improve the functionality and User Experience of the application.
• Participating in code reviews - mostly ensuring the latest (stable/supported) ECMA standards and CSS developments are being used and frontend best practices are applied.
• Bug fixes and cleaning existing code, such as a faulty script which incorrectly matched user search criteria to SQL queries.
• Frontend performance improvements.

Duties Included:

• Developing RESTful API for internal use.
• Hosting the API and other services on VM's.
• Integrating with third-party API's.
• Writing Python scripts to automate tasks.
• Designing and implementing a KPI system for the Hardware Support team.

Recommendations:

Mark Cummins - CEO at Pointy

Luke joined Pointy at one of the highest growth phases of our journey. He was thrown in at the deep end in a company and a job that was changing quickly. Not an easy place to start! Luke proved very capable and adaptable. At the start, our systems were relatively immature, and the tools and processes were far from ideal. Working through this was challenging and frustrating at times, but Luke persevered and helped us develop to the point that we have mature systems in a productive and stable state. He has lots of initiative, always looking to take on projects and spotting improvements or solving issues that had been missed by others. I look forward to seeing what Luke builds over the course of his career!

Reasons for Leaving:

To move to Canada.

Duties Included:

• Data analysis and report writing.
• Developing automated tasks to generate reports.
• Presenting to and training staff in the use of software.

Reasons for Leaving:

To focus on my studies as it was the final year of my undegraduate degree.

Duties Included (further to the above):

• Researching/sourcing software packages.
• Writing manuals.
• Presenting and training staff in the use of software.

Reasons for Leaving:

End of placement/to travel - I had one month of travel planned between the end of the placement and the beginning of the final year of my bachelors.

Hitch was an early stage student-led startup that evolved from winning a hackathon - "HackDCU 2.0", at DCU Alpha in Dublin, Ireland.

Duties Included:

• Leading the development team.
• Creating wireframes and performing usability testing.
• Developing the Hitch website and Android prototypes.
• Applying for grants and pitching to potential investors.

Reasons for Leaving:

Lack of funding and to focus on my studies before joining ESB for my undergraduate placement. Carpooling as a service resides in a legal grey area in Ireland. The Taxi Regulation Act 2013 was enacted to prevent unlicensed drivers from being allowed to drive passengers for monetary gain, effectively halting Uber's entry into the Irish market. Due to this it was difficult to find funding and, due to this being our first foray into tech entrepreneurship, we were grossly inexperienced. A failure but a great learning experience.

This project was originally an engineering challenge presented to me when applying for a contract role. I was initially told to only spend a handful of hours on it and specifically told not to use a database, but I returned to this project at a later date to convert the repo into an example of how I might approach a fullstack project using Python & FastAPI on the backend with a React, Redux, TypeScript frontend. The project is containerised with Docker and uses a Postgres DB instance.

• Source Code

This project was undertaken as the main assignment of the CA684 Machine Learning module of the DCU MSc in Computing (Artificial Intelligence). Due to my accurate results and robust, meticulous experiments, I was awarded a result of 85.7%: the highest result in my class and 2nd overall out of the 175 students taking the module! This module was shared with 10 other classes, mostly full-time classes, 4 of which were at the PhD level.

• Project Paper
• Source Code

The aim of this project was to develop a quick doodle digit classifier. Over the course of about 1.5 weeks I gradually built this digit classifier from the couch while watching TV in the evenings. The model is not complex and no regularization or dropout was employed, just a rough-and-ready example of using TensorFlow JS for in-browser ML applications.

• Try it!
• Source Code

At its core this application is a typical calorie-counting application: the user can add meals which contain ingredients, where the user specifies the weight/quantity consumed of each ingredient in the meal. It then uses a nutritional value database (in the case of this app, the USDA Food Composition Database).

• Project Report
• Source Code

To try this game, simply click the "Launch Game" button below. Click the cards to find pairs.

• Launch Game
• Source Code

To try this game, feel free to click the "Launch Game" button below. Use your keypad to move the character.

• Launch Game
• Source Code

To see the Jasmine framework tests in action, please click on the "Launch Site" button below and scroll down to the end of the RSS feeds. You will find the Jasmine reporter panel at the end of the page. You can also follow the test driven.

• Launch Site
• Source Code