Benjamin Root
Senior Software Engineer at JANUS Research Group
Bedford, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Root is a Senior Software Engineer with 16 years of experience blending scientific computing, geoscience domain expertise, and production software development from Bedford, MA. Trained as a meteorologist (BS/MS Penn State) and formerly a PhD candidate, he has applied atmospheric science to build high-resolution flood, snow, and soil-moisture mapping systems and commercial risk products. He’s a long-time contributor to core scientific Python projects—matplotlib, NumPy, and scikit-learn—where his work spans documentation, API design, numerical bug fixes, and algorithmic robustness (notably improving the Hungarian solver and Map plotting tools). Comfortable across backend and full-stack tasks, he’s fixed edge cases, added tests, and removed brittle dependencies to improve maintainability in widely used libraries. At JANUS Research Group and previous roles he converts complex domain models into reliable, testable code, and his contributions often reveal an attention to reproducibility and educational clarity (e.g., enhancing Matplotlib tutorials and exercises). An engineer who started as a meteorologist, he brings a rare combination of domain intuition and open-source craftsmanship to scientific software.
15 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Meteorology, Master of Science - MS Meteorology at Penn State University
Stackoverflow
610reputation
72kreached
5answers
1question
Github Skills (32)
scipy10
lib10
python10
api-design10
data-science10
matplotlib10
testing10
technical-writing10
scikit10
machine-learning10
numpy10
gis10
scikit-learn10
maps10
unit-test10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
matplotlib/AnatomyOfMatplotlib
Jun 2013 - Oct 2019
Anatomy of Matplotlib -- tutorial developed for the SciPy conference
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:51 commits, 20 PRs, 33 pushes in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin's commits primarily focused on updating and improving the documentation for the Matplotlib project. Their contributions included adding documentation links, fixing typos, and incorporating improvements to the formatting and clarity of the tutorial notebooks. The changes involved updating links, adding content related to colormaps, and refining explanations of key concepts such as plotting attributes and properties, demonstrating a focus on enhancing the educational value of the documentation. The user also worked on updating the exercises by separating them and adding solutions to make them more user-friendly.
pythonanatomyscipymatplotlib-tutorialmatplotlib
matplotlib/basemap
Feb 2011 - Aug 2020
Plot on map projections (with coastlines and political boundaries) using matplotlib
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 121 commits, 115 PRs in 9 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily focused on improving the functionality and maintainability of the `basemap` library. Their contributions included removing dependencies, explicitly providing axes objects, performing input validation, and optimizing clipping mechanisms. They also addressed reported bugs, added test cases, and made version updates, enhancing the overall quality and reliability of the library. The user's changes involved modifications to core files within the library, including `__init__.py`, and related test files.
boundariesgeopandaspythonplotcoastlines
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