James Porter
Self Employed
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Porter is an independent technical consultant with 13 years of experience building and operating backend systems, especially in genomics and developer tooling. A University of Chicago grad in Biology and Computer Science, he helped build the National Cancer Institute’s Genomic Data Commons and has deep hands-on experience integrating bioinformatics tools and optimizing resource management in projects like bcbio-nextgen. He spent seven years at the Recurse Center running programming, community, and operational programs while shipping code and mentoring other engineers. His open-source contributions to IPython and bcbio show an emphasis on reliability—fixing race conditions, improving serialization, and hardening core alignment and resource workflows. Based in Philadelphia, he combines scientific training with practical infrastructure skills to solve complex data and systems problems for research and engineering teams.
13 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Biological Sciences, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Biological Sciences at University of Chicago
Spanish
Stackoverflow
1,883reputation
88kreached
20answers
12questions
Github Skills (18)
notebook10
python10
jupyter10
data-science10
ipython10
rna-seq10
bioinformatics10
serialization9
data-serialization9
gatk7
elisp6
triangulation6
delaunay6
flask6
emacs6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
bcbio/bcbio-nextgen
Oct 2013 - Mar 2014
Validated, scalable, community developed variant calling, RNA-seq and small RNA analysis
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on back-end development, contributing to various aspects of the bcbio-nextgen project. Their work included fixing bugs related to the handling of project summaries, integrating external tools (like Tophat) using resources from configuration files, and enhancing resource management. The user also made updates to documentation and modified core alignment processes.
scalablecallingrnaseqvariant-callinggenomics
ipython/ipython
Nov 2013 - Apr 2014
Official repository for IPython itself. Other repos in the IPython organization contain things like the website, documentation builds, etc.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 1 comment in 5 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on addressing race conditions and improving the stability of the IPython project. They fixed issues related to file decoding and profile directory creation, and improved the determination of public IP addresses. The user also added support for cloudpickle serialization and updated the documentation to reflect this change, broadening the serialization options for IPython.
documentation-websitepythondata-sciencebuildsnotebook
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