Franklin Chen
Research Programmer at Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolFranklin Chen is a seasoned Research Programmer at Carnegie Mellon University with nearly three decades of software engineering experience, combining rigorous academic training in physics from Harvard with long-term practical work in research and tooling. He focuses on building correct, efficient, and well-documented software, often tackling installation, build automation, and cross-platform robustness—evidenced by contributions to projects like IHaskell (improving Jupyter Haskell kernel installs) and Homebrew formulae. Comfortable across languages and ecosystems, he has fixed subtle production issues in Ruby wrappers and package scripts, demonstrating attention to edge cases such as timeout handling and dependency resolution. Based in Pittsburgh, he pairs deep technical craftsmanship with a user-centered mindset and a curiosity that led him to teach chess, reflecting an analytical, strategic approach to problem solving.
29 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
A.B. with Honors, Physics, Magna cum laude, A.B. with Honors, Physics, Magna cum laude at Harvard UniversityPh.D., not completed, Computer Science, Ph.D., not completed, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon UniversityPh.D., not completed, Theoretical Physics, Ph.D., not completed, Theoretical Physics at Princeton University
Italian, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish, English
Stackoverflow
756reputation
91kreached
4answers
0questions
Github Skills (30)
formula10
package-management10
scripting10
bash10
ruby10
homebrew10
automation10
script10
pygments10
install-script10
formulas10
automations10
syntax-highlighting10
haskell10
linux9
Programming languages (39)
Github contributions (5)
pygments/pygments.rb
Aug 2014 - Jan 2015
đź’Ž Ruby wrapper for Pygments syntax highlighter
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 3 comments, 1 issue in 5 months
Contributions summary:Franklin primarily focused on improving the robustness of the Ruby wrapper for the Pygments syntax highlighter. They addressed a critical issue by ensuring the `timeout_time` variable is an integer and checking the value of an environment variable. Further, they added clarification about invalid `MENTOS_TIMEOUT` variables. The user also performed minor whitespace adjustments.
ruby-wrappersyntax-highlighterrubyhighlighterpygments
Homebrew/legacy-homebrew
Oct 2013 - Sep 2015
đź’€ The former home of Homebrew/homebrew (deprecated)
Role in this project:Automation Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
Automation Engineer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:7 commits, 7 PRs, 18 comments in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Franklin primarily contributed to the Homebrew package manager repository by fixing and updating formula definitions. Their work involved modifying Ruby scripts (formulae) to install software correctly. They updated existing formulae, addressing installation issues related to dependencies, file locations, and build processes. The contributions included new formula additions and modifications to existing ones.
macoshomebrew
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