Joshua Ballanco
Principal Software Engineer at Manhattan Metric, LLC
Greenville, South Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoshua Ballanco is a Principal Software Engineer with 17 years of experience building scalable, distributed systems and bridging infrastructure with data science. His career spans roles at Apple, Cognitect, and several startups where he delivered high-throughput servers, automated business-rule engines, and large-scale platform migrations. He combines deep systems-level expertise (notably contributions to MacRuby and JRuby core behavior) with practical product delivery—leading e-commerce and AI platform efforts and deploying graph databases for enterprise AI. Joshua holds advanced degrees in computational biochemistry, bringing a scientific rigor to performance optimization and algorithmic problem solving. Based in Greenville after time in Miami, he balances hands-on coding with technical leadership and a knack for translating research-grade ideas into production software. An often-overlooked strength is his long history of improving language runtimes and scrapers, showing fluency across low-level runtime work and domain-specific data pipelines.
17 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D., Computational Biochemistry, Ph.D., Computational Biochemistry at Stevens Institute of TechnologyGraduate Work, Biochemistry, Graduate Work, Biochemistry at University of Miami
Github Skills (25)
e-government10
objective-c10
c-language10
jvm10
python10
scraper10
java10
ruby10
data-gov10
javas10
parliamentary-data10
data-scraping10
g10
cprogramming-language10
government-data10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
MacRuby/MacRuby
Dec 2009 - Jan 2015
MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector, the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Foundation and ICU frameworks.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 2 pushes, 1 comment in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Joshua primarily focused on enhancing the MacRuby implementation, targeting Objective-C method aliasing and related core functionality. They modified the `vm.cpp`, `vm.h` files to enable aliasing of Objective-C methods and resolve associated issues, as well as updating specs. The user also implemented several MRI encoding APIs and addressed multiple feature requirements within the project. These changes indicate an effort to extend MacRuby's capabilities in line with the Ruby language specifications.
runtimecompilergarbageon-topicu
openstates/openstates-scrapers
Jul 2011 - Nov 2011
source for Open States scrapers
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Joshua focused on developing state-specific scrapers for the openstates-scrapers repository. They primarily worked on creating and updating metadata files ( `__init__.py` ) for Rhode Island, including session details and start dates. The user also implemented data scraping logic in `legislators.py`, `committees.py`, and `bills.py` to extract relevant information, demonstrating familiarity with the data structure required by the scraper framework.
scraperpythongovernmentscrapers
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