David Mertz
Principal Engineer at KDM Training
Portland, Maine, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Mertz is a Principal Engineer and seasoned author with 13+ years of hands-on software experience and a long history of practical, research-informed writing—seven technical books and the widely read "Charming Python" column—bridging deep Python expertise with real-world engineering. He architects and leads data-driven systems, specializing in Python, text and data cleaning, NLP, and scientific computing, with consulting work spanning cryptography, data modeling, and regulatory domains. A frequent keynote speaker and longtime Python Software Foundation leader, he brings comparative, analytic perspective to documentation, training, and developer workflows as well as production code. Based in Portland, Maine, he runs KDM Training to deliver tailored PyData instruction and is helping steer engineering at SEIU, combining activist-aligned mission work with rigorous technical practice. Unusually for an engineer, he pairs a PhD-level background in philosophy with deep practical codecraft, which shows up in clear exposition and a knack for translating abstract concepts into usable tools.
13 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D. Philosophy, Ph.D. Philosophy at University of Massachusetts AmherstB.A. Philosophy Mathematics, B.A. Philosophy Mathematics at University of Colorado Boulder
Github Skills (200)
programming-language10
python10
data-manipulation10
gtk10
kd-tree10
quantile10
sparse-data10
qt10
dataframes10
pandas10
sparse-matrix10
sampling10
coalescing10
sparse10
data-science10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
DavidMertz/DavidMertz.github.io
Mar 2021 - Feb 2025
Contributions:6 PRs, 140 pushes, 3 branches in 3 years 11 months
contentsgnosis
atlantistechnology/sdt
Oct 2022 - Dec 2022
Semantic comparison of versioned files with git awareness
Contributions:1 release, 217 commits, 6 PRs in 2 months
awarenesslintversion-controlversionedstyle
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.