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
python10
package-management10
r10
testing10
package-development10
command-line-interface10
bash10
conda10
cmake10
latex10
build-automation10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
jdblischak/git-for-science
Feb 2015 - Sep 2022
A quick introduction to version control with Git and GitHub
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:345 commits, 72 PRs, 376 pushes in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on documenting and preparing the repository for submission to a journal. Their work involved modifying the main LaTeX file, adding a table of resources, and integrating figure legends and supporting information. The user also created scripts for generating difference files and compiling the final PDF according to the required PLOS submission format. This involved adjustments to code blocks, cross-referencing, and direct embedding of the bibliography.
version-controlsciencesystems-biologybiologyopen-science
workflowr/workflowr
Dec 2016 - Dec 2022
Organize your project into a research website
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:30 releases, 4 reviews, 1162 commits in 6 years 1 month
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on implementing new features and improving existing functionality within the workflowr R package. They worked on adding unit tests, refactoring existing code, and making the package more robust. A key contribution was updating the code to be compatible with a new version of the git2r package.
rmarkdownpythonversion-controlorganizeresearch-website
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