Jim Hester
Senior Software Engineer - R Focused Infrastructure at Netflix
Chagrin Falls, Ohio, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJim Hester is a software engineer with 15 years of experience, currently at Netflix and previously on the tidyverse team at RStudio. He is a prolific open-source contributor across the R ecosystem—working on devtools, pkgdown, roxygen2, testthat and core tidyverse packages—focused on improving package tooling, documentation and testing. His work bridges high-level R APIs and low-level systems: he has touched C/C++ maintenance, package installation tooling, and CI/CD and coverage integrations (Coveralls/Travis, GitHub Actions). He implemented practical developer-facing features like deploy_site_github and enhancements to remotes and license detection, showing a knack for shipping infrastructure that simplifies releases. Contributions to oh-my-zsh and the DFHack project underscore a broader curiosity for shell tooling and cross-language systems that improve developer ergonomics. Based in Cleveland, he brings production-grade engineering and a strong focus on reproducible data workflows and developer experience.
16 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors, Biotechnology, Bachelors, Biotechnology at Kent State UniversityCertificate, Bioinformatics, Certificate, Bioinformatics at Stanford University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (96)
apache-spark10
parser10
package-management10
testing10
data-manipulation10
databases10
c1110
data-parsing10
ruby10
c1710
knitr10
automation10
cplus10
build-automation10
rcpp10
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
tidyverse/readr
Jun 2016 - Nov 2021
Read flat files (csv, tsv, fwf) into R
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:8 releases, 3 reviews, 778 commits in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Jim primarily contributed to the development and testing of the `readr` library, specifically focusing on enhancing the functionality of parsers for various file formats (CSV, TSV, etc.). Their contributions included fixing bugs related to parsing numeric data, adding support for new time formats, addressing issues with handling comments, and improving the consistency of error messages. They also developed and refined tests for the implemented features, verifying the correctness of the parsing logic with a focus on edge cases and handling various data encodings.
csvtsvsasparsingcsv-files
r-lib/devtools
Jan 2015 - Nov 2021
Tools to make an R developer's life easier
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:21 releases, 7 reviews, 930 commits in 7 years
Contributions summary:Jim implemented and refined tools within the R package devtools. Their contributions focused on enhancing test coverage and CI/CD integration, particularly by implementing and configuring Coveralls support via Travis CI. The user was also involved in improving internal functions for interacting with GitHub, managing package dependencies, and simplifying the process of releasing packages. They also implemented a function for handling more complex package dependencies using remotes.
r-packagepackage-creationrstatslifer
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