Joel Ostblom
Assistant Professor Of Teaching at The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoel Ostblom is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and data science educator with 11 years of experience bridging biomedical research and reproducible programmatic analysis. He earned a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and transitioned from quantitative image-analysis for stem cell and developmental biology into curriculum development and Masters-level teaching at UBC. Joel is an active open-source contributor and steering committee member of Vega, co-maintaining Altair and improving widely used Python visualization libraries (Plotly, Matplotlib, Seaborn), where his work often focuses on documentation, examples, and user-facing clarity. He combines deep domain experience in life sciences with practical software craftsmanship—improving tooling from back-end features to front-end visuals—and has a knack for turning complex computational workflows into teachable, reproducible pipelines. Based in Vancouver, he champions data literacy through courses, open resources, and hands-on contributions that make visualization and analysis more accessible to researchers and students.
11 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Nanyang Technological UniversityFlorida Gulf Coast UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Biomedical/Medical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Biomedical/Medical Engineering at University of TorontoDoctor of Medicine (M.D.), Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) at Karolinska institutet
Swedish, English, French
Stackoverflow
45,764reputation
23.3mreached
485answers
49questions
pandas
top-1%
dataframe
top-5%
matplotlib
top-1%
string-interpolation
top-5%
tar
top-5%
colors
top-1%
Github Skills (49)
data-visualizations10
file-management10
javascript10
visualization10
python10
matplotlib10
charts10
graph10
pandas10
data-visualisation10
aggregate-functions10
groupby10
colors10
datasets10
console-application10
Programming languages (33)
Github contributions (5)
jazzband/Watson
Apr 2020 - Jun 2021
:watch: A wonderful CLI to track your time!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 10 PRs, 56 comments in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Joel made several contributions to the `watson` project, a command-line time tracker. They implemented new features, such as controlling the order of days in the log output and specifying a start time for projects. The user also addressed bug fixes by modifying the CSV output and the start/stop functions. These changes demonstrate a focus on improving the core functionality and user experience of the time-tracking application.
cliproject-managementtimetracking
vega/altair
Oct 2020 - Jan 2023
Declarative visualization library for Python
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 326 reviews, 38 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Joel made several contributions to the Altair documentation, addressing display issues and improving clarity. They updated the documentation by fixing typos, correcting code snippets, and revamping various sections to enhance readability and user experience. Furthermore, the user contributed to the examples by adding new examples and reformatting code to align with the project's style guidelines. They also addressed and fixed issues related to the rendering of images in tooltips and other chart functionalities, contributing to the overall quality and usability of the library.
pythonvisualization
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