Thomas A. Plick

Capabilities

Overview

I am a software developer with seven years of professional experience in startup environments. I concentrate on back-end development, but I have also done front-end work. Most of my professional work has involved Python, Django, PostgreSQL, and AWS. My résumé is available here. I am also familiar with many other languages and frameworks, listed below.

In addition to my professional experience, I hold a Ph.D. in computer science from Drexel University (granted in 2012). Some of my graduate school work can be found under the section of this document marked Writings.

Technical Proficiencies

Programming languages and frameworks:

• Python (Django, CherryPy, Tornado, RabbitMQ)
• JavaScript (jQuery, React)
• SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite)
• PHP (MediaWiki)
• HTML/CSS
• Other languages: Java, Perl, C, C++, Lisp, Scheme, OCaml, Haskell, Smalltalk

• Amazon Web Services (EC2, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, S3)
• Google Cloud Platform (Compute Engine, Storage)
• Heroku

For my professional experience, see my résumé.

Projects

Checkmate Champ: chess training software

Checkmate Champ is a website that presents chess training exercises and lets the user solve them interactively. The back-end is implemented with Python. The front-end is implemented in JavaScript and in OCaml. The OCaml is compiled to JavaScript using js_of_ocaml.

the new amecy games: a site for turn-based board games

the new amecy games is a website that allows users to play turn-based (correspondence) board games with each other. The site supports chess and several modern board games (including Amazons, which is mentioned below). The back-end is implemented with Python (using the CherryPy framework) and PostgreSQL. The back-end also uses Tornado (an asynchronous Python framework) to support long polling on game pages. When a move is made in a game, anyone watching that game will see the move immediately.

To get a general feel for the site, you can view some of the games in progress here.

Hippolyta: a game-playing program

Hippolyta is an AI program that plays a board game (Amazons). The program is written in C. It plays on littlegolem.net and is currently ranked 5th out of 24 active players in the Amazons ladder tournament (standings here). The program's source code is available here.

Writings

A New Constraint on Perfect Cuboids (journal article, 2017)

Problems in Extremal and Combinatorial Geometry (PhD thesis, 2012)

A note on the Caro-Tuza bound on the independence number of uniform hypergraphs (journal article, 2012, written with Béla Csaba and Ali Shokoufandeh)

Introduction to Combinatorial Game Theory (talk given for the Drexel MCS Society, 2008)

page last updated on November 1, 2023