Ian Davis
Freelance Contributing Data Journalist
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIan Davis is a data-driven researcher and freelance contributing data journalist with 17 years of experience applying statistical and engineering skills to public policy, civic tech, and international development. He blends applied machine learning, NLP, and geospatial analysis with production-grade backend engineering in Go—contributing bug fixes and performance improvements to high-profile open-source projects like the Go runtime, IPFS, libp2p, and Filecoin. His recent work includes a realtime NLP tool for Stanford Cohen Lab, pandemic-era attitude analysis at Stanford SPARQ, and a wealth-estimator prototype to inform equitable tax enforcement at the IRS, demonstrating a rare mix of policy impact and systems-level coding. Comfortable with end-to-end pipelines—from web scraping and interactive dashboards to rigorous causal inference—he is now seeking a full-time research role at a mission-driven organization. An often-overlooked strength is his multilingual field experience and hands-on survey work, which grounds his quantitative models in real-world human contexts.
17 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Psychology and Statistics, Bachelor's degree Psychology and Statistics at Haverford CollegeSpanish Language, Spanish Language at Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de OaxacaThe Doane Stuart School
Spanish
Github Skills (28)
json10
caching10
debug10
programming-language10
lib10
back-end-development10
testing10
http10
ipfs10
logger10
networking10
libp2p10
go10
filecoin10
audit-logging10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
filecoin-project/lotus
Oct 2020 - Jan 2023
Reference implementation of the Filecoin protocol, written in Go
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:37 reviews, 62 commits, 24 PRs in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Ian's primary contributions focused on bug fixes and enhancements to the Filecoin protocol's reference implementation, written in Go. Their work involved correcting field usage in reward calculations and addressing a potential hang condition in the event listener's initialization process. They also added a field to the message receipt for event root, which demonstrates a contribution to the core functionality of the Filecoin blockchain. Additionally, they added historic event indexing.
golangipfsfilecoinblockchainfilecoin-protocol
libp2p/go-libp2p
May 2021 - Jul 2021
libp2p implementation in Go
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:5 reviews, 8 commits, 3 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Ian primarily focused on improving the stability and functionality of the `libp2p` implementation in Go. Their work included fixing a hang issue within the `BackoffDiscovery.FindPeers` function and adding comprehensive tests for the examples to ensure proper functionality and catch regressions. Additionally, the user refactored code to remove vet and staticcheck failures and added examples to enhance the repository's usability and testing capabilities.
golangipfsp2ppeer-to-peerorbitdb
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