John Blischak
Freelance Scientific Software Developer at JDB Software Consulting, LLC
Akron, Ohio, United States
Summary
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RockstarJohn Blischak is a freelance scientific software developer with 13 years of experience building tooling, packages, and training materials for research software and reproducible workflows. Based in Akron, Ohio, he combines deep R and bioinformatics packaging expertise (notably contributions to conda-forge and Bioconda recipe ecosystems) with teaching and technical writing, having produced educational lessons on Git, R, and command-line data analysis. He has a strong track record modernizing build systems and CI for cross-platform packages (including work on conda-build and azure-sdk-for-cpp builds) and improving R package tooling such as workflowr. John pairs hands-on backend and automation engineering with clear documentation skills—preparing journal-ready manuscripts and reproducible analysis pipelines—making him effective at translating researcher needs into robust, reusable software. An uncommon strength is his blend of academic research experience (postdoc and graduate research at the University of Chicago) with open-source build and release engineering across major community channels.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
1,112reputation
148kreached
11answers
2questions
Github Skills (34)
ninja10
git10
reproducible-research10
conda-forge10
package-management10
python10
r10
package-development10
testing10
command-line-interface10
bash10
conda10
cmake10
latex10
build-automation10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
conda/conda-build
Aug 2017 - Nov 2021
Commands and tools for building conda packages
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 8 PRs, 33 comments in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:John focused on improving the `conda-build` tool, particularly within the context of building conda packages from CRAN. Their contributions involved refactoring and enhancing the CRAN recipe generation process, including adding support for license files and addressing comment handling. They also added unit tests to ensure the proper generation of license information. Furthermore, the user addressed code quality issues by fixing potential bugs and ambiguous variable names.
condaconda-buildpackage-management
jdblischak/snakemake
May 2021 - Mar 2023
This is the development home of the workflow management system Snakemake. For general information, see
Contributions:1 PR, 14 pushes, 6 branches in 1 year 10 months
management-systemworkflow-management-systemgeneral-informationsnakemakeworkflow-management
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