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.
12 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
A Python data analysis library that is optimized for humans instead of machines.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:20 commits in 16 days
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on enhancing the `agate` library by introducing new features and refining existing functionalities. Their contributions included implementing a `percentile` function, adding a `mad` method, and integrating a `z-scores` function to the codebase. Furthermore, the user worked on test suite improvements by updating various test files with expanded test cases, and addressing potential issues.
Contributions:105 commits, 92 pushes, 5 branches in 3 years 8 months
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