Chris Jerdonek
Founder at Shotwell Labs, Inc.
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Jerdonek is a founder and experienced software engineer based in San Francisco with 15 years building reliable back-end systems, DevOps tooling, and developer-focused documentation. He combines deep technical rigor—rooted in advanced mathematics (AB from Harvard, PhD work at UC Davis)—with practical open-source engineering, contributing to cornerstone Python projects like pip, CPython, setuptools, and Django. His work spans bug fixes, test automation, and architecture refinements, plus Ops-focused contributions that made supervisor init scripts robust across platforms including Amazon Linux. As a technical writer he has clarified and reorganized key packaging and developer guides, improving usability for broad developer communities. Chris is comfortable shifting between low-level language semantics (generator/asyncio fixes) and higher-level operational concerns, an uncommon blend that helps bridge developer experience and production reliability. He co-founded Shotwell Labs and brings entrepreneurial instincts to shaping tools and docs that scale.
14 years of coding experience
Ph.D., Mathematics, Ph.D., Mathematics at University of California, DavisA.B., Mathematics, A.B., Mathematics at Harvard University
Stackoverflow
5,979reputation
1.3mreached
20answers
7questions
unit-testing
top-5%
python
top-5%
javascript
top-5%
npm
top-1%
Github Skills (48)
unit-testing10
git10
debug10
npm10
restructuredtext10
python10
sphinx10
django10
testing10
service-management10
configuration-management10
linux10
bash10
generator10
websocket10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
pypa/pip
Sep 2014 - Sep 2019
The Python package installer
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:489 commits, 329 PRs, 153 pushes in 5 years
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on fixing bugs and refactoring code related to version control systems (VCS) within the pip package installer. Their contributions included modifying the "egg name" handling for Git repositories, updating documentation to reflect those changes, and adding tests to improve the robustness of the freeze command. Further work included refactoring for issue fixes and general code comment improvements.
pythonpackage-installerpippackaginginstaller
django/django
Aug 2021 - Aug 2021
The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:270 reviews, 14 commits, 92 PRs in 21 days
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the Django framework's testing infrastructure. They added new testing features such as `LiveServerTestCase.server_thread_class` and `DiscoverRunner.get_test_runner_kwargs()`, enabling greater flexibility and control for developers subclassing existing test classes. Furthermore, they refactored test-related code to ensure more robust test runs. The user also addressed several bugs and vulnerabilities in the testing suite related to session handling and SQLite in-memory databases.
pythondjango-frameworkappsdjangoframework
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.