Jim Hester
Software Engineer at netflix
Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Summary
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RockstarJim Hester is a Senior Software Engineer with 16 years of experience specializing in R-focused infrastructure, currently driving R integration and platform support at Netflix. A long-time tidyverse and RStudio contributor, he maintains 20+ CRAN packages (some for over eight years) that see millions of weekly downloads and has deep experience bridging R with big data, notebooks, and ML platforms. His open-source work spans core projects like rstudio, ggplot2, Rcpp, readxl and sparklyr, often touching low-level C/C++ and cross-platform compatibility issues as well as testing and CI. At Netflix he blends advocacy for R users with practical engineering—building packages to access internal data platforms and shepherding notebook prototypes into production-ready package releases. Known for meticulous backend work and developer tooling, he also contributes unexpected touches (e.g., ANSI-colored pkgdown output and oh-my-zsh plugins) that improve everyday developer experience. Based in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, he pairs a research-backed bioinformatics background with pragmatic software engineering across large-scale data ecosystems.
16 years of coding experience
Github Skills (94)
apache-spark10
parser10
package-management10
testing10
data-manipulation10
databases10
c1110
data-parsing10
ruby10
c1710
knitr10
automation10
cplus10
build-automation10
file-processing10
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
tidyverse/readr
Jun 2016 - Nov 2021
Read flat files (csv, tsv, fwf) into R
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:8 releases, 3 reviews, 778 commits in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Jim primarily contributed to the development and testing of the `readr` library, specifically focusing on enhancing the functionality of parsers for various file formats (CSV, TSV, etc.). Their contributions included fixing bugs related to parsing numeric data, adding support for new time formats, addressing issues with handling comments, and improving the consistency of error messages. They also developed and refined tests for the implemented features, verifying the correctness of the parsing logic with a focus on edge cases and handling various data encodings.
csvflat-filerfwfparsing
r-lib/remotes
Jan 2016 - Nov 2021
Install R packages from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, git, svn repositories, URLs
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 releases, 5 reviews, 395 commits in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Jim contributed to the `remotes` package, which focuses on installing R packages from various sources. Their work primarily involved enhancing the package's functionality to handle repositories specified within package descriptions, specifically integrating parsing logic for additional repositories. Further contributions focused on updating the package to include SHA updating logic for GitHub remotes, enabling better version control. The user also addressed R CMD check notes by ensuring appropriate imports.
bitbucketgitlabrr-packagesvn
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