Joe Kington
Staff Software Engineer at Planet
Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoe Kington is a Staff Software Engineer and quantitatively oriented geoscientist with 16 years of experience building production-grade geospatial and imaging systems. He leads engineering for Python-based distributed basemap pipelines at Planet, where he architected a cost-efficient, visually seamless global imagery stack and shipped ML-driven color correction and image normalization for new products and environmental monitoring partners. His background spans geophysics and sedimentology to software engineering, with a PhD from UW–Madison and hands-on experience applying scientific rigor to ML, testing, and data-processing problems. An active open-source contributor, he has improved core scientific Python projects such as NumPy and Matplotlib—adding tests, fixing hillshading math, and enhancing tutorial docs—bringing production-grade robustness to community tools. Based in Salt Lake City, he pairs domain expertise with pragmatic engineering and a taste for bad coffee, local beer, and barefoot hiking.
16 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Geology, BS, Geology at Tennessee Technological UniversityPhD, Geophysics, PhD, Geophysics at University of Wisconsin-MadisonMS, Geology, MS, Geology at The University of Alabama
Stackoverflow
279,558reputation
29.4mreached
1,051answers
2questions
pandas
top-1%
matplotlib
top-1%
virtualenv
top-5%
dictionary
top-5%
imagemagick
top-5%
type-conversion
top-1%
Github Skills (79)
python10
image-processing10
multidimensional-arrays10
profiling10
seaborn10
matrix10
charts10
pandas10
statistics10
plot10
numpy10
maps10
type-conversion10
data-visualization10
test-automation10
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
matplotlib/AnatomyOfMatplotlib
Jun 2015 - Jul 2015
Anatomy of Matplotlib -- tutorial developed for the SciPy conference
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:18 commits, 9 PRs, 2 pushes in 14 days
Contributions summary:Joe primarily contributed to the documentation of the "anatomyofmatplotlib" repository. Their work involved overhauling existing content and fixing broken links within the documentation. The user also ensured compatibility by reverting to an older notebook format. These contributions focused on improving the clarity, accuracy, and usability of the tutorial.
pythonanatomyscipymatplotlib-tutorialmatplotlib
matplotlib/matplotlib
Jan 2012 - Aug 2015
matplotlib: plotting with Python
Role in this project:Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:36 commits, 2 PRs, 18 comments in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Joe contributed to the `matplotlib` repository by fixing calculation errors within the hillshading functionality of the `LightSource` class, ensuring correct aspect calculation and proper clipping for planar surfaces. They also added tests to validate `LightSource` functionality, including tests for hillshading and planar surfaces, as well as including examples for its use in 3D surface plots. Furthermore, the user made code improvements related to documentation and adhering to PEP8 standards while ensuring the code avoids leaking file descriptors.
pythondata-sciencegtkdata-visualizationplotting
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