Jim Hester
Senior Software Engineer - R Focused Infrastructure at Netflix
Chagrin Falls, Ohio, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJim 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
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors, Biotechnology, Bachelors, Biotechnology at Kent State UniversityCertificate, Bioinformatics, Certificate, Bioinformatics at Stanford University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (96)
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.
csvtsvsasparsingcsv-files
r-lib/devtools
Jan 2015 - Nov 2021
Tools to make an R developer's life easier
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:21 releases, 7 reviews, 930 commits in 7 years
Contributions summary:Jim implemented and refined tools within the R package devtools. Their contributions focused on enhancing test coverage and CI/CD integration, particularly by implementing and configuring Coveralls support via Travis CI. The user was also involved in improving internal functions for interacting with GitHub, managing package dependencies, and simplifying the process of releasing packages. They also implemented a function for handling more complex package dependencies using remotes.
r-packagepackage-creationrstatslifer
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