Michelle Byrnes

• Designed and developed a PHP and React based internal CLI and dashboard application that automates performance testing and telemetry collection. Reduced workflow execution time from hours to <60 seconds, enabling engineering and non-technical teams to self-serve complex diagnostic tasks.
• Led performance initiatives that have reduced origin latency by margins of 12% to 24% across high traffic deployments. Implemented New Relic profiling and k6 Grafana Cloud distributed load testing to validate the solutions scale.
• Conducted critical reliability analysis for enterprise-grade deployments (including NASA). Identified and patched a critical bug that would have caused application downtime during the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse traffic spike.
• Led rapid prototyping initiatives for enterprise partners, architecting proof-of-concept solutions that validated platform capabilities. These technical, onsite deep-dives directly drove the successful integration of Gutenberg Blocks into client production environments.
• Engineered a novel caching strategy for Remote Data Blocks that reduced page response times by 34%, decreasing our global infrastructure costs for the hosted fleet.

• Spearheaded a cross-functional initiative to refactor internal command-line utilities into a user-facing product. This self-service model eliminated 37% of manual intervention requests annually.
• Invented internal tools that reduced time to delivery by 70% for rote database operations.
• Interviewed stakeholders to identify system friction points, translating qualitative feedback into technical requirements for the internal tooling roadmap.

• Acted as a technical lead for complex escalations, debugging distributed system failures across Kubernetes, PHP, and SQL layers that were unsolvable by tier-1 and tier-2 teams.
• Managed high-availability monitoring for enterprise clusters. Executed real-time incident response and root cause analysis for distributed systems using Kubernetes, New Relic, and Elasticsearch.
• Implemented proactive site health monitoring for top-tier deployments, preempting failures before they impacted service availability during critical business events.

• Advised metadata changes that improved search accuracy by 250%.
• Designed client side solutions given server side restrictions.
• Researched, reviewed, and customized platform tools and features to be leveraged and maintained by non technical users.

• Engineered an interface that eliminates 75% of redundant labor.
• Revised a theme to optimize the UI by decreasing excessive clicks by 66%.
• Led technical training workshops and published theme documentation.

• Developed a search interface that increased relevant content delivery by 350%.
• Pioneered an import process that reduced data ingestion time by 99%.
• Spearheaded data standardization that cut maintenance needs by 60%.
• Directed platform migration that raised page sessions by 75% in 1 year.
• Authored a WordPress curriculum that grew the platform by 33% in 1 year.

My modded version of Pokémon Emerald, written in C. Original mods include a day/night cycle, a new PC access from the PokéNav, and many developed mods from others, like alterations to the DexNav to allow access from the PokéNav.

My independent research into a novel physics based, bio-inspired language model. Leverages gradient accumulation, and multithreading to keep the training loop fast.

A chatbot I built to learn more about training a very simple Byte Pair Encoding tokenizer.