Summary
John Heasly is a data engineer with 12 years of experience who specializes in turning messy, public-facing information into reproducible datasets that drive investigative and accountability journalism. At USA TODAY he automates scraping, ETL, and monitoring pipelines with Playwright, Python, GitHub Actions, and Google Cloud, and applies Pandas, SQLite, and Vertex AI to clean, classify, and surface story leads. He builds tooling that helps reporters scale workflows and track changes over time, marrying newsroom priorities with production-grade engineering. An active open-source contributor, he has enhanced the agate Python library with statistical functions and stronger tests, reflecting a focus on human-friendly data tooling. Based in Wildwood, Missouri, he brings a pragmatic, tenacious approach shaped by a background that includes an MSJ from Northwestern and time in the U.S. Navy. Not obvious from the resume: he combines newsroom empathy with backend rigor to prioritize reproducibility and auditability in every pipeline he builds.
13 years of coding experience
M.S.J., M.S.J. at Northwestern University
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Bachelor of Arts - BA at University of Notre Dame