Timothy Helton

Learn Something New Every Day

About Me

Timothy Helton

Software Developer and Aspiring Data Scientist

After a tough spell of physical battles in 2014, I received a phone call with the news I was a Type I diabetic. The reaction to various foods, physical exertion, and synthetic insulin is unique for each patient, resulting in the process for determining appropriate medication doses being largely experimental.

BG Diagnosis

I began logging the fat, protein, carbohydrates and the resulting induced blood glucose levels for every item of food consumed. In short order, I had accumulated a vast array of records and began probing for trends and adjusting my insulin usage based on logical findings.

BG Month

During a time of my life with many difficult changes, one benefit was discovering a passion for the fundamentals of data science.

At the time, I was employed by Corvid Technologies in Mooresville, North Carolina as a structural analyst investigating nonlinear ballistic impacts for the Missile Defense Agency. The explicit finite element simulations representing each engagement scenario generated multiple terabytes of information. These data sets were orders of magnitude larger than the models I created to investigate the fatigue behavior of a prototype spinal implant produced by DePuy Synthes for my master’s degree thesis in mechanical engineering while attending the University of Denver.

Test Fixture
Wing Mesh
SEM

In order to cope with an aggressive time line set by the customer, I proceeded to automate any aspect of the work flow possible. This included cleaning the raw data, formatting the input files for the solver, analyzing output and visualizing the results. Other team members in the company took notice of the modules I had written and began to use them as well. This greatly enriched the quality of my coding abilities. These new users implemented the code in ways that I never intended or covered with unit tests, which resulted in additional feature enhancements.

After a lot of hard work, I'm grateful to be a scientist with the opportunity to earn a living writing code and learn something new every day. Thanks for visiting my site.

View Resume

Formal Education

  • The University of Denver
    • 9/2009 - 12/2010
    • M.S. Mechanical Engineering
    • Thesis: Fatigue Testing and Computational Analysis of a Spinal Implant
  • The University of Colorado
    • 1/1997 - 5/2001
    • B.S. Mechanical Engineering
  • K2 Data Science Bootcamp
    • 1/2017 - 12/2017

Skills

  • Atlassian Suite 2 years
    • BitBucket
    • Confluence
    • JIRA
  • C++ 1 year
  • Git 6 years
  • LaTeX 3 years
  • Python 7 years
  • SQL 3 years
  • Web Development 2 years
    • CSS
    • HTML
    • Javascript