Joshua Tauberer
Head Of Product Development at LARSA, Inc
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoshua Tauberer is a seasoned technologist and product leader with 21 years of experience building developer-facing systems, open data platforms, and scientific software. As Head of Product Development at LARSA and founder of GovTrack, he combines hands-on backend engineering (Python, C, Fortran) with product strategy to deliver industry-leading tools and APIs used by millions and adopted by government itself. He led the creation of the first comprehensive open-data API for congressional legislation and continues to contribute to prominent open-source projects such as the unitedstates/congress data collectors and mail-in-a-box. Joshua is fluent in turning complex legal and legislative data into performant, reusable systems—optimizing parsers, caching layers, and data pipelines—while also designing novel structural-analysis algorithms for engineering products. A trained linguist (MA/PhD work) with a background in psychology, he brings analytical rigor and communication skills to technical policy work and stakeholder advocacy. Beyond code, he’s known for institution-building: growing technical teams, modernizing development practices, and shaping open-government standards.
21 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
AB Psychology, AB Psychology at Princeton UniversityPh.D. Linguistics, Ph.D. Linguistics at University of Pennsylvania
Hebrew, English
Stackoverflow
161reputation
6kreached
5answers
1question
Github Skills (46)
python10
django10
post10
data-serialization10
data-parsing10
data-management10
pdf-parsing10
serialization10
regular-expression10
dns10
performance-optimization10
postfix-notation10
profiling10
yaml10
data-extraction10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
unitedstates/congress
Sep 2012 - Jan 2023
Public domain data collectors for the work of Congress, including legislation, amendments, and votes.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 293 commits, 47 PRs in 10 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Joshua primarily contributed to the development of back-end features for the project, specifically focusing on importing and parsing data related to the U.S. Congress. They implemented XML output formats and built parsers for vote information, including roll call votes and related historical data, and also refactored existing code to improve reusability. Additionally, the user worked on integrating text versions of documents, specifically parsing PDFs to plain text and linking to GovInfo.gov.
votescollectorsextractionpublic-domaindomain-data
unitedstates/congress-legislators
Sep 2012 - Jan 2023
Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML/JSON/CSV, as well as committees, presidents, and vice presidents.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 694 commits, 390 PRs in 10 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Joshua focused on optimizing the performance of the YAML loading process in the repository by caching it in a pickled format. They implemented a caching mechanism that utilized file hashing to ensure the cached data matched the YAML content, significantly improving the speed of data loading. Furthermore, the user made modifications to various scripts to update and add entries for the 113th Congress, 116th Congress and the most recent election results. They demonstrated proficiency in Python and utilized YAML and CSV formats for data management.
csvyaml
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