Alexandra Dunn
Digital Library Architect at UCSB Library
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlexandra Dunn is a Digital Library Architect with 14 years of experience designing and building scholarly web applications and preservation services at UCSB Library. She led development of the Samvera-based Alexandria Digital Research Library and has driven projects from ARK minting tools to full redesigns that prioritize accessibility and long-term digital stewardship. A pragmatic back-end developer, she contributes to prominent open-source ecosystems—including significant work on Homebrew and MELPA—improving package management, version handling, and build tooling. Her background in philosophy informs a thoughtful, user-centered approach to metadata, curation workflow design, and policy-driven engineering decisions. Comfortable working across libraries, academia, and developer communities, she blends systems-level architecture with hands-on code contributions to keep research collections discoverable and sustainable.
15 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Arts (M.A.), Philosophy, Master of Arts (M.A.), Philosophy at UCSBBachelor of Arts (B.A.), Philosophy, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Philosophy at Reed College
Github Skills (15)
dependency-management10
package-manager-tool10
homebrew10
regular-expression10
command-line-tool10
software-packaging10
package-manager10
package-management10
emacs-lisp10
ruby10
emacs9
git9
macos8
haskell5
go5
Programming languages (37)
Github contributions (5)
Homebrew/legacy-homebrew
Sep 2014 - Apr 2016
💀 The former home of Homebrew/homebrew (deprecated)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:597 commits, 1307 PRs, 659 pushes in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Alexandra primarily contributed to the `homebrew/legacy-homebrew` repository by updating and adding formulae, likely to maintain compatibility and functionality for software packages used within the Homebrew ecosystem. The commits involve modifying existing formulae for software like `pandoc` and `webp`, adding new formulae for packages such as `vnu` and `hugo`, and ensuring the correct dependencies are included. These changes demonstrate the user's involvement in the packaging and distribution of software via Homebrew.
homebrew
melpa/melpa
Aug 2015 - Dec 2016
Recipes and build machinery for the biggest Emacs package repo
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:21 commits, 15 PRs, 88 comments in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Alexandra primarily contributed to the Emacs package build system, focusing on enhancing its version handling capabilities. Their work included adding features to parse version strings more flexibly via regular expressions, incorporating support for stable versions for various VCS systems such as Darcs and Bazaar, and deprecating the EmacsWiki support. Additionally, they modified existing code, including adding functions, and updating documentation. This indicates a focus on improving the core functionality and maintainability of the package build process.
emacs-package
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