John Parent
Senior Research And Development Engineer at Kitware Inc.
City of Troy, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Parent is a Senior Research and Development Engineer with seven years of experience building robust CI/CD and build automation for complex software ecosystems. Based in Troy, NY, he has progressed at Kitware from R&D Engineer to senior roles, applying research-driven engineering to production-ready tooling. He is an active open-source maintainer for Spack on Windows, where he improved GitHub Actions, installer CI, and cross-platform build resilience—work that surfaces in the widely used spack/spack package manager. John combines a strong academic foundation (MS from Clarkson, BS from RPI) with hands-on expertise in shell refactoring, environment handling, and installer pipelines. He is particularly attuned to edge cases in Windows build environments and long file-path handling, which often break conventional automation. Colleagues rely on him to translate research prototypes into repeatable, maintainable build and release systems.
7 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteMaster of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at Clarkson University
Github Skills (12)
windows10
sh10
batch10
github-ci10
script10
shell10
githubaction-workflow10
batchfile10
ci-cd-pipeline10
scripting10
build-automation10
package-manager9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
spack/spack
Jul 2021 - Jan 2023
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Role in this project:
Automation Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
Automation Engineer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:1365 reviews, 52 commits, 379 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:John's contributions focused on enhancing the build process and CI/CD infrastructure for the `spack/spack` repository. Their work included adding and configuring GitHub Actions for Windows, setting up installer CI, and improving the existing CI/CD pipeline. They also refactored shell scripts, added code to accommodate more complex file paths, and fixed issues with environment variable handling.
compilerpackage-managerpythonspackhpc
johnwparent/spack-msvc-wrapper
Oct 2023 - Jul 2026
C++-based compiler wrapper for cl.exe on Windows
Contributions:124 pushes, 26 branches in 2 years 9 months
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