Alan Crosswell
Chief Technology Officer at Columbia University
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlan Crosswell is a seasoned technology leader and CTO at Columbia University with 23 years of experience building secure, scalable backend systems. He combines hands-on engineering—demonstrated by substantial open-source contributions to high-profile projects like Django REST Framework, django-oauth-toolkit, and JSON:API extensions—with strategic leadership across academic and nonprofit institutions. Known for improving API schema generation, OAuth security, and JSON:API support, he brings deep expertise in web APIs, authentication, and reliable release processes. Based in New York, he also serves in volunteer leadership roles for the Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation and Columbia’s amateur radio club, reflecting a blend of technical stewardship and community engagement.
23 years of coding experience
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at Columbia University
Github Skills (22)
api-rest10
python10
api-design10
restful-api10
django10
testing10
django-rest10
json-api10
security10
django-rest-framework10
rest-api10
openapi10
oauth10
pagination9
yaml9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
django-oauth/django-oauth-toolkit
Feb 2018 - Jan 2023
OAuth2 goodies for the Djangonauts!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 releases, 379 reviews, 74 commits in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily focused on enhancing the security and functionality of the Django OAuth Toolkit. Their commits involved implementing basic authentication for the introspection endpoint, adding support for alternative scope requirements, and fixing race conditions in token creation. Furthermore, the user was responsible for various bug fixes, including migration errors and issues related to client secret handling. They also contributed to the project's documentation and release process.
oauthpythondjangooauth2
django-json-api/django-rest-framework-json-api
Feb 2018 - Aug 2022
JSON:API support for Django REST framework
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:167 reviews, 33 commits, 219 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily contributed to the `django-rest-framework-json-api` repository by addressing bugs, implementing new features, and improving code quality. Their work included fixing issues in the example application, adding configurable pagination parameters, and implementing the JSONAPIOrderingFilter for sorting. They also refactored code, updated tests, and improved the documentation.
django-rest-frameworkrestpythonjson-api
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