Dan Allan
Data Engineering Group Lead
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDan Allan is a Data Engineering Group Lead and scientific software developer with 13 years of experience building open, reproducible data systems for large user facilities. Based at Brookhaven National Laboratory and rooted in a PhD in Physics from Johns Hopkins, he leads efforts in data management, secure remote access, and high-throughput experiment workflows that directly improve day-to-day science at NSLS-II. A pragmatist who champions open source, he chairs the technical steering committee of the widely used Bluesky project and authored Caproto, work that has influenced facility-scale data acquisition and hardware control. His contributions span core scientific Python projects—numpy, pandas, IPython, JupyterLab, and lmfit—showing fluency across back-end performance work and front-end usability improvements. He combines facility-scale engineering with hands-on experimentation experience (from designing microrheology software to running a high-volume science demo career), bringing both domain insight and a knack for making complex systems approachable.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Johns Hopkins UniversityB.S. in Physics, B.A. in Music, and B.S. in Applied Math, B.S. in Physics, B.A. in Music, and B.S. in Applied Math at University of Rochester
English
Stackoverflow
34,693reputation
7.1mreached
189answers
16questions
pandas
top-1%
number-formatting
top-1%
slice
top-5%
left-join
top-5%
floating-point
top-1%
dataframe
top-1%
Github Skills (59)
scipy10
javascript10
number-formatting10
python10
jupyter10
api-design10
data-science10
model-driven10
testing10
pandas10
typescript10
ipython10
ffmpeg10
ui-design10
groupby10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
soft-matter/trackpy
Aug 2012 - Feb 2020
Python particle tracking toolkit
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 997 commits, 82 PRs in 7 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Dan contributed to the codebase by making mux less picky about filenames and cleaning up feature comments. They modified code within the "mux.py" file to enhance video processing and added a new function to separate the connection as a function. Moreover, they worked on correcting frame indexing issues and included a new function called "batch_annotate" to further annotate frames. The user also added error handling to database connections.
particlepythonparticle-trackingtrackingpanda3d
intake/intake
Nov 2018 - Feb 2021
Intake is a lightweight package for finding, investigating, loading and disseminating data.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 reviews, 143 commits, 29 PRs in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Dan primarily worked on improving the `RemoteCatalog` class within the `intake/intake` repository. Their contributions include implementing pagination features to handle large catalogs efficiently, making the page size configurable, and refactoring the code to improve performance and reduce unnecessary looping. They also focused on refining the server-side interactions to support pagination and enhance the catalog's ability to work with remote data sources. These changes collectively improve the scalability and efficiency of accessing remote data through the Intake catalog system.
pythondata-sciencedata-accessfindingsinger
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