Jeanine Adkisson is a seasoned software engineer and toolsmith with 15 years of experience designing elegant, user-focused developer tools and languages. Currently a Gem Fellow, she maintains Rouge, a 15-year-old Ruby syntax-highlighting project relied on by GitLab, Jekyll and many others, and regularly handles complex lexer, regex and parsing work across hundreds of languages. Her career mixes production engineering at organizations like GitLab, CrowdStrike and the Canadian Digital Service with deep open-source contributions (Parsimmon, Rouge, vim-coffee-script, tmuxinator) that improve parsing, build tooling, and editor integrations. She combines technical leadership—setting project direction and owning active PR backlogs—with hands-on implementation, from compilers and type checkers to accessibility-focused web tooling. Based in Toronto, she also channels creative practice into music and game projects, founding a studio whose flagship title exceeded 30,000 Steam wishlists. Known for making small, simple, beautiful tools, she excels at understanding diverse users and translating that into robust, long-lived software.
15 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Mathematics, Bachelor's degree, Mathematics at University of California, Berkeley
Master of Science - MS, Mathematics and Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Mathematics and Computer Science at Tokyo Institute of Technology
A pure Ruby code highlighter that is compatible with Pygments
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:40 reviews, 903 commits, 301 PRs in 9 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Jeanine primarily contributed to the Rouge project by implementing a variety of lexers. This includes development of new lexers for languages such as Javascript, Java, Scheme, and TOML, along with enhancements to existing lexers such as C++, PHP and Ruby. Their work focused on expanding the scope of supported languages within the syntax highlighting library, as reflected in their commits focused on functionality and integration.
A monadic LL(infinity) parser combinator library for javascript
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:107 commits, 10 PRs, 12 pushes in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Jeanine primarily focused on enhancing the functionality of the parser combinator library. Their contributions include adding a browser build for packaging the library and creating a JSON example to demonstrate its usage. They also implemented stricter code practices, such as the use of `use strict`, and refactored the codebase to improve error messaging and incorporate features like `lazy` and `seq`.
combinatorjavascriptparser
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