Chris Sewell
Research Scientist at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Switzerland, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarChris Sewell is a research scientist and open-source software engineer with 11 years of experience building tools for reproducible computational science. Based in Switzerland and active across projects hosted on GitHub, he has made notable contributions to widely used tooling such as Jupytext, MyST-Parser, Jupyter Book, and the Sphinx ecosystem—improving notebook/markdown interoperability, documentation rendering, and developer workflows. He blends backend and full‑stack development with documentation and DevOps work, optimizing core systems like AiiDA for performance and maintainability while also enhancing user-facing features and build processes. Known for pushing open, shareable science, he focuses on reproducibility and tooling that bridges interactive computing and publication-quality documentation. A detail-oriented engineer, he often contributes not just code but documentation, workflow improvements, and build-system fixes that make complex scientific tooling more accessible.
11 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
699reputation
215kreached
7answers
8questions
substitution
top-5%
Github Skills (41)
markdown10
javascript10
restructuredtext10
sphinx-doc10
python10
sphinx10
testing10
css10
configuration-management10
cicd10
sc10
documentation-generator10
nib10
scs10
markdown-it10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
executablebooks/MyST-Parser
Feb 2020 - Jan 2023
An extended commonmark compliant parser, with bridges to docutils/sphinx
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Documentation Specialist
Back-end Developer & Documentation SpecialistContributions:74 releases, 143 reviews, 399 commits in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Chris was heavily involved in the initial setup and development of the MyST parser, writing initial code for both the Docutils and HTML renderers. They implemented the basic parsing logic for several core Markdown elements. Additionally, they contributed to the documentation by creating contributing guides and providing syntax summaries, as well as fixing issues with examples and intersphinx referencing, and implementing example pages.
pythoncommonmarkextendedcompliantsphinx-extension
executablebooks/meta
Jul 2020 - Jul 2022
A community dedicated to supporting tools for technical and scientific communication and interactive computing
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:28 reviews, 31 commits, 55 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the documentation and feature voting functionality of the repository. They implemented a feature voting page, including integrating a Tabulator table and fetching data from an external JSON file. Further enhancements include the addition of GitHub stars to the gallery page and the migration from `sphinx-panels` to `sphinx-design` for improved layout.
dedicatedcommunicationscientificcomputingsupporting
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.