[{"content":"Tacet Systems, LLC is a software and data engineering consultancy based in Chicago, IL. It is owned and operated by Kollin Mendoza.\nI specialize in building peaceful systems. Whether you\u0026rsquo;re working as an administrator drowning in forms, or a technical team building a cloud-based SaaS product—I would love to make your work life easier.\nLet me help you find peace in the systems powering your business.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://www.tacetsystems.com/about/","section":"Tacet Systems","summary":"","title":"About"},{"content":"","date":null,"permalink":"https://www.tacetsystems.com/categories/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Categories"},{"content":"Organization: Home Partners of America (HPA)\nTimeline: Approx. 2 weeks\nResults # AWS cost savings of approx. $8,000/month: compute spend dropped from ~$8,300 to less than $30/month. Runtime of image-processing ETL batch jobs reduced 99.5% from ~80 hours to ~5 minutes per task. Resolved intermittent, customer-facing issue of production home listings missing photos—eliminating a crucial sales blocker. Silenced noisy alarms plaguing data engineering team, bringing peace. Enabled machine learning initiatives (e.g., listing factor inference and enrichment) that were previously blocked. Problem #HPA operated a complex single-family rental investment platform, relying on massive data ingestion from MLS feeds to evaluate property viability and display listings. By 2023, the engineering team had scaled from 5 to 50 MLS feeds, but the underlying image processing pipeline had not kept pace with growth. This pipeline downloaded photos at URLs provided by the feeds, created resized versions, and saved to internal S3 stores for website and data science use.\nThe legacy system processed images sequentially, creating a severe bottleneck. Tasks deployed to AWS ECS Fargate, originally intended to run for a few minutes at a time, frequently ran for over 80 hours. This caused:\nWasted Spend: Hundreds of ECS tasks were running simultaneously, resulting in approximately $8,300/month in wasted compute costs (based on 2022 rates). Operational Risk: Website listings went live without photos for days until either a scheduled job happened to populate them, or the website team requested an ad-hoc pull for surfaced listings missing photos. Technical Debt: The system relied on \u0026ldquo;band-aid\u0026rdquo; fixes, such as Lambda functions that forcibly terminated long-running tasks, rather than architectural improvements. Solution #I audited the pipeline and identified that the workload was almost entirely I/O bound (network latency during downloads), not CPU- or memory-bound. Instead of rewriting the entire architecture, I optimized the logic within the existing AWS ECS Fargate environment using multithreading.\nBy discretizing the ETL process so that each image URL was processed independently, the modular function could be used with concurrent.futures and thus many images could be downloaded and processed simultaneously1, reducing runtime by ~200x.\nThis performance gain also allowed the RAM allocated to tasks to be reduced, further minimizing costs.\nTechnical nit: not truly simultaneously due to the Python GIL.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://www.tacetsystems.com/selected_work/image-pipeline-optimization/","section":"Selected Work","summary":"Saving $8k/month with multithreading","title":"Image Pipeline Optimization"},{"content":"A small selection of representative work done.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://www.tacetsystems.com/selected_work/","section":"Selected Work","summary":"","title":"Selected Work"},{"content":"I specialize in helping bring peace to your work. Technology was supposed to make our lives easier, right?\nFrom automating spreadsheets and PDF form submissions for administators to debugging distributed systems in the cloud—I make systems peaceful.\nBusiness Automation #Sick of filling out forms and spreadsheets? Adobe driving you nuts? There are solutions between pulling your hair out and subscribing to an expensive cloud-based solution.\nYou would be amazed by what you can accomplish with simple solutions on a shared drive!\nDebugging Distributed Systems #Maybe you\u0026rsquo;re at a SaaS startup and you spend hours digging through logs for various connected services. Those are hours wasted. I\u0026rsquo;ve spent plenty of those, so I\u0026rsquo;m happy to take it off your plate and work to ensure your systems quiet down.\nWhenever you hear from it, it will be true signal and not \u0026ldquo;Exception Raised: Please investigate.\u0026rdquo;\nETL Development #I can orchestrate disparate data sources into a clean source of truth that integrates with your data lake/base/warehouse/mart/store solution. I take a \u0026ldquo;black box\u0026rdquo; approach, building modular pieces which are flexible in their inputs, and clear in their outputs.\nWanna crack the black boxes open? I write code with extensive yet clear and concise comments and docstrings; I believe code should be able to be read by humans (and bots, if you so choose). Nothing obfuscated.\nCloud Cost Optimization #Do you really need that SageMaker endpoint? I can find sources of high spend, and audit whether or not they\u0026rsquo;re truly necessary. I can deliver a plan to lower your cloud bill by eliminating waste for your team to run with, or implement it for you.\nWhat about [another thing]? #Maybe! I love computers. Reach out and I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear about what you\u0026rsquo;ve got going on.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://www.tacetsystems.com/services/","section":"Tacet Systems","summary":"","title":"Services"},{"content":"Are you\u0026hellip;\nAn administator drowning in forms? An engineer pulling your hair out debugging distributed systems? A founder wondering how AWS got so expensive?\nReach out! Tacet would love to help you save both your money and sanity.\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://www.tacetsystems.com/","section":"Tacet Systems","summary":"","title":"Tacet Systems"},{"content":"","date":null,"permalink":"https://www.tacetsystems.com/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tags"},{"content":"Success — thanks for reaching out! Expect a response within a business day.\n← Back to home\n","date":null,"permalink":"https://www.tacetsystems.com/thanks/","section":"Tacet Systems","summary":"","title":"Thank you!"}]