Dane Hillard is an Associate Director of Product Engineering with 11 years of experience architecting scalable, developer-focused platforms and driving product delivery at ITHAKA. He blends hands-on engineering—from Python package publishing and CLI tooling to backend refactors—with strategic technical leadership, shaping content-processing pipelines and enterprise adoption of generative AI. Dane has led large cross-functional teams, coordinated major platform migrations with minimal disruption, and built internal developer portals and design systems that improve velocity and ergonomics. An active open-source contributor and technical writer, he refines example code and docs for widely used projects like Practices of the Python Pro and git-secrets, demonstrating attention to developer experience. Based in New York, he pairs a pragmatic engineering mindset with a knack for uncovering small process changes that yield outsized operational gains.
11 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Engineering Mathematics, Computer Engineering Mathematics at University of Michigan
Examples and exercises for Practices of the Python Pro from Manning Books 🐍📘
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:23 commits, 2 PRs, 20 pushes in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Dane primarily focused on enhancing the example code for the "Practices of the Python Pro" book. They refactored the rock-paper-scissors game, improved the bark.py bookmarking application, and updated various code exercises per the published errata. They also made a minor contribution to ch05/test_tax.py, and incorporated HTML and CSS for an errata file. This indicates a focus on refining and improving existing code examples.
SQL reporting that Just Works. Fast, simple, and confusion-free. Write and share queries in a delightful SQL editor, with AI assistance.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:12 commits, 7 PRs, 20 comments in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Dane primarily focused on improving the functionality and maintainability of the SQL Explorer application. Their contributions included refactoring code to avoid unnecessary UTF-8 conversions, updating URL conventions, and removing unused imports. They addressed bugs related to query list titles and implemented compatibility features for login redirection. The user also worked on preparing the project for release by updating setup configurations.
sql-queriesdjangosql-databasesqlcollab
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Dane Hillard - Associate Director, Product Engineering