Dan Blanchard
Staff Software Engineer at Monarch
Durham, North Carolina, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDan Blanchard is a Staff Software Engineer with 18 years of experience building distributed systems, ETL pipelines, and resilient CI/CD platforms, currently based in Durham, NC. A Python specialist, he has led large migrations and cost-saving infrastructure projects—most notably a 63TB Elasticsearch migration that cut AWS spend by ~$120k/year—and designed billing and multi-cloud platform features at scale. He blends backend systems work (Storm, Kafka, Thrift, conda tooling) with platform engineering, SRE practices, and full-stack components for data-driven products. An active open-source maintainer, Dan has made significant contributions to widely used projects like chardet and streamparse and helped modernize ML and devtooling libraries for Python 3. He’s known for mentoring engineers, improving developer workflows, and tackling thorny production incidents with pragmatic tooling. Dan’s unusual combination of linguistics and computer science training informs his careful approach to encoding, text processing, and data-quality problems.
18 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree, Linguistics, Master's Degree, Linguistics at University of DelawareBachelor's Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science at Millersville University of Pennsylvania
English
Stackoverflow
111reputation
654reached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (64)
git10
apache-storm10
back-end-development10
python10
py10
package-management10
setuptools10
testing10
command-line-interface10
nltk10
kafka10
packaging10
build-system10
data-serialization10
distributed-systems10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
chardet/chardet
Dec 2013 - Dec 2022
Python character encoding detector
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 releases, 8 reviews, 241 commits in 9 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Dan made significant contributions to the chardet project by integrating and resolving merge conflicts from various upstream changes. Their work involved merging branches, addressing conflicts in multiple files including core modules and configuration files, and refactoring the setup.py. Furthermore, the user corrected issues with line endings, implemented argument parsing, and refactored the command-line tool. The overall focus was on maintaining, updating, and improving the utility of the code.
character-encodingpython
pystorm/streamparse
Jul 2014 - Dec 2020
Run Python in Apache Storm topologies. Pythonic API, CLI tooling, and a topology DSL.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:39 releases, 1 review, 550 commits in 6 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Dan's contributions focused on refactoring and improving the streamparse project. They updated the project documentation, improved Python 3 compatibility by making code adjustments across multiple modules, and addressed build-related issues, including the use of `simplejson`. They also fixed issues related to the build process with leiningen, and added code for supporting remote debugging.
apache-stormclidslpythonstorm
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