Arfon Smith
Senior Fellow at Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolArfon Smith is a seasoned technology and research software leader with 15 years’ experience bridging product, data science, and engineering across open source, academia, and industry. Currently a Senior Fellow at Schmidt Sciences, he focuses on amplifying scientific discovery through investment in research software, robust data management, and AI-driven tooling. Previously he led AI product for GitHub Copilot and founded the Data Science Mission Office at STScI, steering multi-petabyte archives for flagship NASA missions like Hubble and JWST. He also co-founded the Zooniverse and created the Journal of Open Source Software, publishing over 2,500 software papers to make research code citable and reviewable. A hands-on engineer and prolific contributor (notably improving language detection in GitHub’s linguist and bootstrapping the JOSS Rails app), he excels at translating cross-disciplinary needs into scalable, community-driven infrastructure. Based in Edinburgh with a PhD in molecular astrophysics, he combines deep scientific training with product-level impact.
15 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Molecular Astrophysics, PhD Molecular Astrophysics at University of NottinghamAstrophysics, Astrophysics at University of OxfordBSc Hons Chemistry, BSc Hons Chemistry at The University of Sheffield
Stackoverflow
69reputation
28kreached
4answers
2questions
Github Skills (25)
language-detection10
database-migrations10
objective-c10
c-language10
rails10
database-migration10
cprogramming-language10
ruby-on-rails10
testing9
git9
rspec9
prolog9
css8
perl8
user-interface7
Programming languages (32)
Github contributions (5)
openjournals/joss
Jan 2016 - Nov 2022
The Journal of Open Source Software
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:44 reviews, 1330 commits, 527 PRs in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Arfon primarily focused on setting up the initial Rails application and integrating essential components. Their work included setting up CSS styling via Primer-CSS, moving to the RSpec testing framework, and creating database migrations and models for the "papers" and "users" classes, showing expertise in building a core application structure. The user implemented routing and a basic submission form. Their work also includes adding basic tests for the database models and code for the landing page.
publishingopen-accessjournalscientific-softwarescientific-journals
github-linguist/linguist
Dec 2013 - Jan 2017
Language Savant. If your repository's language is being reported incorrectly, send us a pull request!
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:41 releases, 1426 commits, 825 PRs in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Arfon primarily focused on improving the test heuristics for the Linguist repository. This involved modifying the test suite to include Objective-C header files and problematic C++ files. The user also added heuristics to help with more accurate language detection for Perl, Prolog, and xBase. Furthermore, they addressed code conflicts and updated the samples.json file to reflect changes in the language definitions.
linguisticlanguage-grammarslanguage-statisticspull-requestrequest
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