Joshua 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 University
Ph.D. Linguistics, Ph.D. Linguistics at University of Pennsylvania
Mail-in-a-Box helps individuals take back control of their email by defining a one-click, easy-to-deploy SMTP+everything else server: a mail server in a box.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Contributions:31 releases, 31 reviews, 1288 commits in 9 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Joshua's commits reveal a focus on improving the infrastructure and functionality of the mail server. Primarily, the user refactored the backup script to utilize the duplicity program, introduced changes related to setting and checking DNS records, enabling the use of TLS, and expanding the size of the Postfix message. Additionally, the user contributed to setting up Nextcloud functionality and the web interface for the project. The user was involved in the overall reliability and management of the email server by contributing on different aspects of the project.
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
Contributions:5 reviews, 694 commits, 379 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.
csvcongressmemberscsv-jsonjson
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