Derek Willis
Affiliate Professor
Silver Spring, Maryland, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek Willis is an affiliate professor and lecturer at the University of Maryland who brings 17 years of data-driven journalism and developer experience from ProPublica, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He co-founded OpenElections to build a free, standardized corpus of U.S. election data and contributes to high-profile open-source civic projects like the unitedstates/congress and congress-legislators repos, where he’s improved parsing, identifiers, and subject metadata for congressional records. Derek blends newsroom reporting instincts with back-end data engineering—fetching, normalizing and linking messy public datasets into reliable resources used by journalists and researchers. Based in Silver Spring, he is open to freelance work in data processing and analysis and has a knack for quietly turning archival government data into practical, machine-readable tools.
17 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA Rhetoric and Communications, Bachelor of Arts - BA Rhetoric and Communications at University of Pittsburgh
Github Skills (18)
apim10
git10
github10
python10
git-repository10
data-parsing10
regular-expression10
api10
data-processing10
data-extraction10
webscraping9
http-request9
yaml9
csv8
apidoc8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
unitedstates/congress-legislators
Jan 2013 - Jan 2023
Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML/JSON/CSV, as well as committees, presidents, and vice presidents.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Data Engineer
Back-end Developer & Data EngineerContributions:5 reviews, 267 commits, 193 PRs in 10 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Derek primarily focused on enhancing data retrieval and processing within the repository. Their contributions included developing scripts to fetch and update data related to congressional members, specifically C-SPAN IDs and House history IDs. Furthermore, they were involved in integrating and managing data from external sources like the ProPublica API and VoteView. Their work also involved updating existing scripts to improve data accuracy and maintain the integrity of the datasets.
csvcongressmemberscsv-jsonjson
unitedstates/congress
Aug 2012 - Apr 2020
Public domain data collectors for the work of Congress, including legislation, amendments, and votes.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 5 PRs, 1 push in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily contributed to parsing and structuring data related to the U.S. Congress, specifically focusing on bill information. They modified code to extract and format sponsor and cosponsor details, including state, district, and unique member IDs. Furthermore, the user refactored the code to switch from "session" to "congress" and added functionality to include bill subjects. These changes improve the data structure and enhance the accuracy of the data extraction process.
votescollectorsextractionpublic-domaindomain-data
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