Jason Altekruse
Volunteer Software Engineer at Twin Cities Circuits
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJason Altekruse is a volunteer software engineer and founder with 14 years of experience building distributed systems, developer tools, and education-focused web apps. He led core contributions to Apache Drill and helped kickstart the Apache Arrow Java project, bringing deep expertise in columnar data formats, Parquet readers, and query engine optimizations. As the architect of Free Math and contributor to Kolibri and Doenet, he combines thoughtful UX for math typesetting and graph rendering with robust backend engineering to simplify tedious grading and content workflows. His background spans Java/Scala systems work, Spark/Drill query optimization, and full‑stack web and GUI development—often solving tricky parsing and mathematical programming problems. Jason also teaches electronics and bridges visual programming (Scratch) to embedded platforms, reflecting a practical drive to make technical learning accessible. Based in Minneapolis, he pairs open source stewardship with a persistent focus on improving math education at scale.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Undergraduate, Computer Science, Undergraduate, Computer Science at UW-Madison
German
Github Skills (10)
parquet10
data-storage10
javas10
java10
apache-drill10
avro8
data-structures8
data-structure8
data-processing7
unit-testing7
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
apache/drill
Feb 2014 - Jun 2021
Apache Drill is a distributed MPP query layer for self describing data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 104 commits, 25 PRs in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Jason primarily worked on improving the Apache Drill's Parquet reader, focusing on enhancements for features such as reading data from nested lists and improving support for data types like dates, fixed binary, and dictionary-encoded columns. The user implemented several fixes, including resolving a bug related to variable length strings in the Avro reader and addressing an issue causing incorrect record counts with repeated data, as well as fixing issues with filter operations in various scenarios. Their work involved both code modifications and improvements to the test framework to validate the changes.
jdbcdatastreambig-datadatabasehadoop
jaltekruse/Free-Math
Aug 2017 - Nov 2022
An offline React web application for managing digital math homework
Contributions:1201 commits, 9 PRs, 709 pushes in 5 years 3 months
mathreactteachingweb-applicationtodoist
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.