Alex Gascon

Alex Gascon is a software engineer passionate about learning, productivity, and psychology. He thinks of software development as something composed of more than just the programming language you use and focuses on concepts like good practices, scalability, and reliability, or productivity tools or techniques. He currently works as a Backend Engineer at Stripe, and his past experience includes AWS and startups like CoverWallet or MeetYourTalent.

projects by Alex Gascon

Training and Deploying an ML Model as a Microservice
5 weeks · 5-10 hours per week · BEGINNER
Included with a Manning Online subscription
catalog / Data Science

In this liveProject, you’ll fill the shoes of a developer for an e-commerce company looking to build a machine learning solution to help identify bad product reviews. If one of your company’s products receives too many bad reviews, it’s policy to take it down from the e-commerce store. Until now this process has been manual—but your boss has decided that this is too expensive and time-consuming.


Your mission is to automate this process, dramatically increasing the speed of identifying bad reviews, and decreasing the cost to your company. To complete this project you will have to train a machine learning model to recognize and rank positive and negative reviews, expose this model to an API so your website and partner sites can benefit from automatic rankings, and build a small webpage that can run your model for demonstration.


Updated March 2022

  • Revised solutions for each milestone
  • Added click-to-reveal help boxes with hints and guidance
  • Added recommended books and learning resources
  • Edited to focus on Amazon Web Services
  • Added material on using AWS Lambda to support machine learning
  • Clarified and simplified project prerequisites