Jack Cushman
Director at Harvard Law School
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJack Cushman is a Director and technology strategist at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab with 14 years of experience building and stewarding public-facing digital library projects like Case.law, Perma.cc, and Opencasebook.org. He combines a legal background—former appellate attorney and law clerk—with hands-on engineering, teaching "Computer Programming for Lawyers" at Harvard Law School. An active open-source contributor, Jack has strengthened web archiving tooling (notably pywb) and improved Python HTML parsing libraries, reflecting deep expertise in backend systems, content replay, and archival fidelity. Based in Cambridge, he bridges policy, scholarship, and production engineering to deliver reliable, legally informed digital preservation services.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Juris Doctor, Juris Doctor at Northeastern University School of LawBachelor of the Arts Electronic Media, Bachelor of the Arts Electronic Media at Bard College at Simon's Rock
Stackoverflow
2,150reputation
523kreached
20answers
0questions
python
top-5%
pdf
top-5%
django
top-5%
Github Skills (22)
archiving10
python10
css10
archives10
webar10
lxml10
webarchive10
html10
jquery9
django9
msword9
pdf9
dom-manipulation9
wsgi8
testing8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
gawel/pyquery
Jan 2016 - Aug 2021
A jquery-like library for python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 5 PRs, 4 comments in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Jack primarily focused on improving the `pyquery` library, a Python-based jQuery-like library. Their contributions involved fixing bugs related to namespace handling, HTML output, and removal of elements. They also addressed issues related to preserving tail text and escaping entities in the HTML output, showcasing a focus on improving functionality and ensuring accurate HTML generation. These changes demonstrate an understanding of HTML parsing, DOM manipulation, and the underlying library logic.
pythonjquerycssjavascriptjquery-like
webrecorder/pywb
Jan 2014 - Oct 2015
Core Python Web Archiving Toolkit for replay and recording of web archives
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 3 PRs, 5 comments in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Jack primarily contributed to the `pywb` project, a Python web archiving toolkit, focusing on improvements to replay and archival processes. They implemented features to handle chunked transfer encoding, address Unicode decoding errors, and improve WSGI compatibility. Additionally, the user worked on refactoring code related to handling archival URLs and the replay mechanism itself, including the handling of different URL types. The changes involved modifying core components such as replay handlers, archival loaders, and URL rewriting, contributing to the robustness and functionality of the web archiving tool.
pythonreplaypython-webpywbweb-archiving
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.