Travis Hesketh

I’m a senior software engineer in the healthcare sector in London. I primarily work with data pipelining using Python and SQL with Spark. Mastodon

Hi, I’m Travis. I’m a senior software engineer working in the healthcare sector. I have a background in chemistry, and did (roughly) half of a PhD in computational chemistry at the University of Strathclyde before realising that I enjoyed the ‘computational’ side of the work far more than the ‘chemistry’ side. I’m originally from Glasgow, but I moved to Leeds in 2020 and then London in 2023.

You can check out an up to date copy of my CV here.

Development

I taught myself to code in 2014 when I was attending summer school at the University of Glasgow. I’ve been using Python regularly since then, and written quite a bit of both Python 2 and Python 3.

I primarily work as a data engineer, which means I do a lot of work on data pipelining with Python, SQL and Spark. I’m comfortable with any/all Python backend work.

I’m happy using both object-oriented and functional paradigms (though please don’t talk to me about monads or endofunctors) and I’m a big fan of the protocol/driver approach laid out in the Cosmic Python book. I like building stuff that’s simple, neat, and easy to extend.

In terms of cloud providers, I’ve mostly worked with AWS but have poked around with object storage from the three big providers.

Currently working on

  • Learning Rust.
  • Thinking of something to actually build using Rust.
  • A yet unpublished open-source Python library to work with cloud object storage.

Books I enjoyed

  • Architecture Patterns with Python (Harry Percival and Bob Gregory)
  • Kill It With Fire (Marianne Bellotti)
  • Rust In Action (Tim McNamara)

Publications

Here are some things I managed to publish whilst I was still a PhD student:

  • Piotrowska, R., Hesketh, T., Wang, H. et al. Mechanistic insights of evaporation-induced actuation in supramolecular crystals. Nat. Mater., 2021, 20, 403–409. DOI: 10.1038/s41563-020-0799-0
  • Reddy, S. M. M., Raßlenberg, E., Sloan-Dennison, S., Hesketh, T. et al. Proton-Conductive Melanin-Like Fibers through Enzymatic Oxidation of a Self-Assembling Peptide. Adv. Mater., 2020, 32(46), 2003511. DOI: 10.1002/adma.202003511
  • Piotrowska, R., Hesketh, T., Wang, H. et al. Humidity Responsive Tripeptide Crystals, poster presented at Virtual Symposium: Systems Chemistry, City University New York, 18^th^-20^th^ May 2020. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3830735
  • Hesketh, T., pygen-structures: A Python package to generate 3D molecular structures for simulations using the CHARMM forcefield, J Open-Source Softw., 2020, 5(48), 2157. DOI: 10.21105/joss.02157
  • Hesketh, T. and Tuttle, T., Steps Towards Understanding Water Responsiveness, poster presented at the 2019 ScotCHEM Computational Chemistry Symposium, 26^th^ June 2019. Available on PURE. Winner of the ScotCHEM Prize.