Kevin Schaul is a senior graphics reporter at The Washington Post with 15 years of experience blending journalism, data visualization, and software engineering. Based in Chicago and trained in computer science at the University of Minnesota, he ships interactive visuals and tooling that explain complex topics—especially AI—to broad audiences. He contributes to open-source projects, notably adding a Congress instant-answer plugin and trend integrations to DuckDuckGo’s spice ecosystem, reflecting strong back-end and API integration skills. Known for pairing rigorous data work with storytelling, he actively solicits and critiques visualizations and OSS projects, bringing a hacker-journalist’s curiosity to newsroom engineering.
15 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Computer Science at University of Minnesota
DuckDuckGo Instant Answers based on JavaScript (JSON) APIs
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:5 commits in 2 days
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily contributed to the implementation of a "congress" spice plugin, focusing on retrieving and displaying members of Congress using the New York Times API. They added the initial plugin and its associated Perl module, then enhanced it by incorporating state code lookups, improving the title, and changing the member name links to DuckDuckGo searches. Moreover, the user updated the triggers and logic for query handling, implementing a more efficient `startend` trigger and also integrated a "Twitter trends" spice plugin.
Contributions:11 commits, 2 PRs, 10 pushes in 8 months
convertingabbreviations
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.
Request Free Trial
Kevin Schaul - Senior Graphics Reporter at The Washington Post