Dan Kortschak
Software Engineer at Elastic
Adelaide, South Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDan Kortschak is a software engineer and former bioinformatics researcher with 14 years of experience bridging scientific research and production-grade engineering. Based in Adelaide, he leads the bíogo libraries for Go and is a founder and principal contributor to the Gonum scientific computing ecosystem, bringing deep numerical and algorithmic expertise to open-source projects. His work spans low-level runtime and syscall support, interpreter improvements, and high-performance linear algebra and visualization, including notable contributions to the Go language itself and high-profile repos like golang/go and gonum. Comfortable across research and industry settings, he has translated genomics problems into robust software as a lecturer and postdoc, and now applies that rigor at Elastic. A knack for cleaning up critical mathematical implementations and build toolchains makes him unusually effective at improving correctness and performance in foundational code.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
PhD (Genetics), PhD (Genetics) at University of Adelaide
Github Skills (45)
data-visualizations10
algorithms10
programming-language10
type-inference10
evaluation10
expressions10
testing10
windows10
fortran10
linux10
data-visualisation10
interpreter10
graph-database10
plot10
system-calls10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
gonum/gonum
May 2017 - Jan 2023
Gonum is a set of numeric libraries for the Go programming language. It contains libraries for matrices, statistics, optimization, and more
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 releases, 971 reviews, 912 commits in 5 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Dan's contributions focused on improving the internal architecture and mathematical underpinnings of the Gonum library, specifically by cleaning up unnecessary indentation in the Blas/Gonum code, improving exponential matrix behaviour, and refactoring of the linear algebra implementation. These improvements involved interacting with Go's fundamental library for mathematics, as well as contributing to lower-level, computationally intensive sections of the codebase. The user also addressed an issue in the graph library by ensuring consistency in how nodes were stored.
golangdata-analysisstatisticsmatricesoptimization
gonum/plot
Feb 2015 - Jan 2023
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Data Visualization Engineer
Back-end Developer & Data Visualization EngineerContributions:2 releases, 182 reviews, 95 commits in 8 years
Contributions summary:Dan primarily focused on enhancing the `gonum/plot` repository's capabilities related to data visualization. Their contributions included importing and integrating color palettes, specifically from the `biogo.graphics` and ColorBrewer libraries, which directly impacted the visual appearance and thematic representation of plots. They also added support for time-based tick marks. Significant improvements in the performance of contour path reconstruction algorithms were made.
data-analysispythondata-sciencevisualizingdata-visualization
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