Jacob Walls
Django Fellow at Django Software Foundation
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJacob Walls is a Django Fellow and full-stack developer with 10 years of experience building reliable web apps, performance fixes, and developer tooling. He is an active open-source maintainer and contributor to high-profile projects including Django and CPython, where his work has improved query correctness, migrations, and core library behavior. Comfortable across the stack, he pairs backend expertise (Python, Django, testing and code analysis via astroid/pylint) with frontend and typesafe work in TypeScript/React and PrimeVue type definitions. His background in computational musicology and music tech (music21, JW Pepper) informs a pragmatic approach to data integrity and algorithmic processing of domain-specific formats like MIDI and MusicXML. Known for thoughtful test infrastructure and long-term maintainability, he blends academic rigor (PhD in Music Composition) with hands-on product and project leadership in geospatial and enterprise contexts.
10 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (BA) Music and Philosophy, Bachelor of Arts (BA) Music and Philosophy at Williams CollegeMaster of Music (MM) Music Composition, Master of Music (MM) Music Composition at University of OregonDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Music Composition, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Music Composition at University of Pennsylvania
Github Skills (34)
parserator10
static-code-analysis10
debug10
parser10
static-analysis10
python10
django10
testing10
typescript10
inference-engine10
type-definition10
software-quality10
midi10
midi-instrument10
vue10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
pylint-dev/pylint
May 2021 - Jan 2023
It's not just a linter that annoys you!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Code Quality Engineer
Back-end Developer & Code Quality EngineerContributions:10 releases, 1151 reviews, 228 commits in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily contributed to improving the code quality and maintainability of the pylint project, focusing on fixing various bugs and addressing code style issues. They fixed typos, corrected documentation errors, and addressed false positives in pylint's analysis. They also implemented features related to code analysis, such as preventing `used-before-assignment` warnings and incorporating new checks for code style and best practices.
linterlintpep8static-code-analysiscode-quality
cuthbertLab/music21
May 2020 - Jan 2023
music21 is a Toolkit for Computational Musicology
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:494 reviews, 890 commits, 452 PRs in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily focused on improving the music21 toolkit by addressing MIDI conversion functionality. The commits included fixing issues related to how quantizing raw MIDI data and implementing features to handle the lack of time signatures for MIDI, and ensuring that all instruments can be captured from MIDI programs. Documentation and corrections to existing tests were also completed.
dtwpythonmusicologymusic21music
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