Hey, I'm Breeana.

Most people call me Bree.

Breeana Bellflower

Director of Enginering at OneRail, data science and AI/ML enthusiast, astronomy and photography hobbyist, gamer.

instagram

Background

After a lifetime of hacking games and working on code, I take a great deal of pride in my work as a reflection of how far I've come.

There is a sense of peace and fulfillment with good, clean work. It's quiet and unassuming because nobody raises alarms or takes interest in something that works as it's supposed to.

I earnestly believe in the power of managing expectations to allow engineers to carefully plan, write, and test their code. Even in my role, with an abundance of responsibilities to manage, when it comes time to write code I take as much time as I need to write fully tested and planned code.

Maybe that gives you some insight into the kind of person I am. I have a strong attention to detail, and I take nothing for granted. I carry myself with pride and I delight in the beauty of engineering.

My education in Computer Engineering gave me an understanding about underlying hardware, software, and networking protocols. While I have been exposed to software most of my life, my education is what kicked my skills into high gear.

I feel it's important to say that I believe that engineers have the potential to be great regardless of their educational background -- I have known great engineers on both extremes. The key thing that sets great engineers apart is not experience or knowledge; it's about grit and determination. If you have the willpower to be great, you will be great.

As a leader, I seek to encourage and bring out the best in my team. I work hard to educate, to instill pride in good work, and to inspite grit and determination. I lead by example by jumping in to code and demonstrate best practices, and I expect high quality work from my team beause to expect any less does a disservice to them.

As an individual contributor, I will never stop learning the latest and greatest technologies.

Interests

Something that has held my interest for the better part of this last decade is machine learning and artificial intelligence. Throughout university I took every opportunity to apply ML to term projects, and my year-long senior project was entirely focused on applications in ML. I also received my certificate in data science in 2022.

I have not had the opportunity to make good use of the skills that I've accumulated there in a professional capacity, but I have continued to maintain them at least at an enthusiast level.

In addition to statistics, data sciene, and AI/ML, systems architecture, scalability, and design patterns are always of interest to me. Please send book suggestions my way if you have found something that really speaks to you.

Astronomy and cosmology hold another large part of my interest. My passion for outer space is what led me to pursue a higher education in the first place, and I have maintained that passion ever since.

I love photography, both as an excuse to go explore the world around me and as an art form. I tend to focus on cityscapes when I do go out for this.

I also play video games when I get a chance, mostly single player these days. Things like Jedi Survivor, Mass Effect, OneShot, and Shadows of Doubt.

Projects

Below are some of my favorite projects from the past that I can discuss publicly.

Dynamics 365 Field Service Calendar

On a project with Microsoft, the aim of this project was to develop existing Outlook functionality and UX for the Dynamis 365 Field Service mobile and desktop application.

Flawless functionality was expected for 3 different calendar views and booking pages across all browsers as well as Android and iOS devices. Additionally, screen reader compatibility was required on all devices as well.

API interfacing, infinite scrolling, offline mode, and browser- and device-specific compatibility issues were the greatest challenges for this project.

Ace Senior Services

On a project with Ace Hardware, the aim of this project was to develop new gig economy application. I led and participated in discussions about overarching designs, solutioning, and security. I also introduced Azure Boards to the company, and developed the full agile workflow in that system to track progress on the project.

In terms of implementation, I completed two of the three websites required for this gig economy appliation -- the client-facing website and the gig-worker facing website / mobile application. Work for this included design and collaboration for every new back-end API, Stripe integration, Azure authentication integration, extensive accessibility testing, responsive and adaptible UX, and unit testing.

The largest challenge for this project was ideation during development, followed by a severe resource crunch that left me with almost all work on the two websites I mentioned above.

Refinement: A Web-Based Civilization Simulator

Refinement was a website that hosted a computer-vs-computer civilization simulation. All I wanted to do with this project was to have effectively an ant-farm that I could watch along with my friends.

Refinement was designed with a neo-retro feel and a chatroom for discussing the events taking place in the game. The simulation was computed from start to finish on regular intervals and then sent in chunks in a highly compressed format via websockets to all viewers of the site. The frame being viewed was then synchronized to the clock so that all viewers would see the same simulation at the same time.

The canvas API, maintaining high performance, and developing methods for compressing and decompressing game data were the largest challenges for this project.

Custom Operating System

The aim of this project was to develop an operating system that mirrored the capabilities of Linux, including many terminal commands, process scheduling, memory allocation, file system structure, and hardware interfacing. Several protections were added such as semaphor locks and administration of user-specific privileges.

The most challenging aspect of this kind of low level programming was how challenging it was to debug issues. It ended up being an incredibly rewarding project that gave me a really solid understanding of low-level computing. Most computer programs at university include a project such as this, but I mention it here because I feel it was the university project that gave me my greatest insights into how software works in general.

Verilog-based Neural Network

This project, the first in my graduating year and the primary focus of my senior project, was about designing and implementing a neural network in a verilog HDL environment. I laid out the mathematical model of the neural network and sketched diagrams of the hardware design.

Ultimately I landed on making use of a sigmoid approximation described by a few academic papers to describe the activation function. This allowed a simulaton of the artificial neurons in verilog to produce results nearly the same as an equivalent software model.

A lot of the challenge involved here was determining how to represent a non-linear activation function in our hardware. Another big hurdle was writing high precision floating point functionality from scratch. In terms of raw number of hours spent hitting my head against something this still stands as my greatest challenge to date. Even debugging a simple verilog design can be tedious and difficult!

Contact

You can reach me any time at breeanabellflower@gmail.com
Note: Please do not reach out about sales opportunities. I know it's a challenging job, and I don't want to waste your time!