John Flatness
Software Developer at Digital Scholar
Falls Church, Virginia, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJohn Flatness is a seasoned software developer with 17 years of experience building and maintaining web publishing platforms and backend systems. Based in Falls Church, VA, he blends web programming expertise in PHP and Pylons with strong client-side and systems skills across C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Linux and Windows administration. He has deep open-source experience contributing backend improvements to widely used archival platforms like Omeka and Omeka S, where he enhanced media handling, search, authentication, and localization features. At Digital Scholar he continues to apply that museum/library-focused domain knowledge to practical software solutions. His unusual combination of a JD from George Mason Law School and long technical practice gives him an edge in designing auditable, standards-aligned systems. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic refactors that reduce technical debt while improving usability and API design.
17 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Science at Virginia TechJD, JD at George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School
Stackoverflow
32,999reputation
4.0mreached
301answers
0questions
mysql
top-5%
floating-point
top-5%
zend-framework
top-5%
java
top-5%
character-encoding
top-5%
xampp
top-5%
Github Skills (45)
ajax10
json10
jquery10
python10
mysql10
api-design10
zend-framework10
php10
database-design10
virtualenv10
syntaxerror10
configurations10
apache9
qt9
javascript9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
omeka/Omeka
May 2009 - Dec 2022
A flexible web publishing platform for the display of library, museum and scholarly collections, archives and exhibitions.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 releases, 7 reviews, 1763 commits in 13 years 9 months
Contributions summary:John was heavily involved in the development of the Omeka platform, making significant contributions related to its architecture and core functionality. They refactored existing code, specifically within the view helpers, to align with Zend Framework standards. They introduced new features and improvements, such as the "locale" filter for plugin interface localization and overrideable methods for success redirects within the controller. In addition, they were involved in fixing various issues including problems related to database queries and search functionality.
publishingopen-accessexhibitionspublishing-platformscholarly
omeka/omeka-s
Aug 2013 - Jan 2023
Omeka S is a web publication system for universities, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. It consists of a local network of independently curated exhibits sharing a collaboratively built pool of items, media, and their metadata.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:47 releases, 42 reviews, 1741 commits in 9 years 6 months
Contributions summary:John was actively involved in improving the Omeka S web publication system. Their contributions centered on enhancing media handling, including fixing media mutation regressions, refactoring HTML ingester forms, and incorporating an HTML editor for captions. They also worked on database interactions and improved the search functionality for site content. Additionally, they demonstrated an understanding of user authentication and API design.
cmslinked-dataconsistsomekaphp
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.