Ari Epstein
Chief Data Officer
City of Albany, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAri Epstein is the Chief Data Officer for the New York State Department of State with 16 years of experience applying data-driven solutions to public-sector challenges. Trained in public administration (Syracuse Maxwell) and biology (Cornell), he blends policy-savvy leadership with technical grounding and hands-on engineering work. He maintains and modernizes open-source Rails tooling—keeping legacy authorization libraries compatible with newer Rails versions—reflecting a practical focus on maintainability and backward compatibility. Based in Albany, he seeks opportunities to help governments and citizens collaborate on big problems, and balances his public service with advocacy for Adirondack wilderness protection.
16 years of coding experience
Master of Public Administration (MPA), Master of Public Administration (MPA) at Syracuse University - Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public AffairsBS, Biology, BS, Biology at Cornell UniversityInternational Baccalaureate Diploma, International Baccalaureate Diploma at Binghamton High School
Hebrew, French, Latin, Greek, Spanish, Arabic, Yiddish
Github Skills (10)
compatibility10
ruby-rails10
compatible10
rails10
versioning10
backward-compatibility10
binary-compatibility10
ruby10
activerecord9
testing8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
stffn/declarative_authorization
Mar 2014 - Aug 2014
An unmaintained authorization plugin for Rails. Please fork to support current versions of Rails
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Ari primarily focused on maintaining and updating the declarative_authorization plugin for Rails. Their contributions involved adapting the plugin to support newer versions of Rails, specifically addressing deprecated calls and compatibility issues with Rails 4 and later. They also updated the test suite to ensure compatibility across different Rails versions, including adjustments for Rails 4's `attr_accessible` deprecation and changes in Rails' testing environment. These changes indicate a focus on code maintainability and adapting the library to evolving Rails frameworks.
railsauthenticationauthorization
aepstein/vumt
Jan 2020 - Sep 2021
Visitor Use Management Tool
Contributions:1 review, 68 PRs, 88 pushes in 1 year 7 months
management-toolvisitor
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