Ian Cook

Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

Ian Cook is a data infrastructure founder and software leader based in Chapel Hill with roughly a decade of experience, currently serving as Co-Founder and CEO of Columnar. He pairs product leadership—from Director of Product Management at Voltron Data—with deep, hands-on open-source engineering as an Apache Arrow PMC member and long-time committer. His notable technical work includes expanding Arrow’s R dplyr bindings (adding arrange, relocate, case_when, string functions) and driving an initiative to standardize HTTP APIs for Arrow columnar interchange. He’s also worked as a build/release engineer to keep Arrow compatible across platforms via vcpkg, showing a rare fluency across product, core library development, and release systems. His MS in Statistics and BS in Applied Mathematics underpin a pragmatic, data-first approach to shipping robust developer tooling.

11 years of coding experience

Stackoverflow

Stats

597reputation

40kreached

18answers

4questions

Github Skills (33)

cpp-library10

c-language10

strings10

lib10

package-management10

r10

text-manipulation10

code-library10

cmake10

c-lib10

apache-arrow10

dplyr10

build-automation10

c-libraries10

vcpkg10

Programming languages (15)

C#JavaC++RustCCMakeScalaGo

Github contributions (5)

apache/arrow

Nov 2020 - Jan 2023

Apache Arrow is the universal columnar format and multi-language toolbox for fast data interchange and in-memory analytics

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & Core Library Contributor

Contributions:790 reviews, 58 commits, 130 PRs in 2 years 2 months

Contributions summary:Ian primarily focused on implementing and improving the R bindings for the Apache Arrow library. Their work involved adding new functionalities such as `dplyr::arrange()` and `dplyr::relocate()` for manipulating tabular data, along with bindings for string functions such as `sub`, `gsub`, `str_replace`, and `grepl`. Furthermore, the user addressed the integration of `case_when()`, and `coalesce()` functions to improve the user experience within the `dplyr` interface. Additionally, the user contributed to improvements in error handling, and code validation.

memorymulti-languagetoolboxacceleratedarrow

microsoft/vcpkg

Jun 2021 - May 2022

C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & Build/Release Engineer

Contributions:5 reviews, 6 commits, 5 PRs in 11 months

Contributions summary:Ian primarily contributed to updating the Apache Arrow library within the vcpkg package manager. Their work involved upgrading the Arrow versions, applying patches, and fixing dependencies across multiple releases. They also made changes to build scripts and configurations, and addressed compatibility issues, demonstrating a focus on maintaining and improving the build process. Additionally, the user managed dependencies and ensured compatibility with different operating systems.

c-plus-plussetuptoolspackage-managermacoscplusplus

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