Kevin Ushey
Software Engineer at Posit PBC
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKevin Ushey is a software engineer and statistician with 13 years of experience building tools that make scientific workflows more productive, currently contributing at Posit in Seattle. He blends deep R expertise with strong Python and JavaScript skills and is growing his C++ fluency to tackle performance-sensitive problems. Kevin has shipped features across the stack in high-impact open-source projects—improving interactive tutorials in learnr, editor experiences in Ace and CodeMirror, and core R packages like rmarkdown, dplyr, Rcpp and testthat. His background in statistical genetics and large-scale data analysis informs a pragmatic approach to tooling for reproducible research and scalable data pipelines. Colleagues rely on him for thoughtful API changes, robust testing, and subtle UX improvements like code autocompletion and editor diagnostics. Beyond code, he prefers collaborative teams where knowledge-sharing accelerates both product quality and personal growth.
13 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
MSc Statistics, MSc Statistics at The University of British Columbia
English, Japanese
Stackoverflow
20,900reputation
1.3mreached
321answers
28questions
package
top-5%
shiny
top-5%
r
top-1%
dynamic
top-5%
Github Skills (79)
spark-sql10
apache-spark10
github10
data-manipulation10
databases10
autocomplete10
vim10
knitr10
rcpp10
markdown10
javascript10
r10
editor10
emacs-lisp10
devtools10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
rstudio/rstudio
Oct 2013 - Dec 2022
RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1221 reviews, 7281 commits, 3241 PRs in 9 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Kevin contributed to the development of the RStudio IDE, focusing on backend functionalities and infrastructure. They added support for Quarto documents, implemented code for setting document properties, and ensured proper handling of environment variables during deployments. Their work also involved improving the user interface for setting project parameters.
integratedrstudiointegrated-development-environmentidedevelopment-environment
RcppCore/Rcpp
Nov 2013 - Oct 2022
Seamless R and C++ Integration
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & QA Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA EngineerContributions:35 reviews, 219 commits, 51 PRs in 9 years
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily focused on enhancing and stabilizing the core functionality of the Rcpp package by addressing bugs and ensuring it functioned as expected. Their work involved fixing issues in the Rcpp.package.skeleton tool and implementing comprehensive unit tests for it. The user also made improvements to string handling and implemented faster subsetting.
r-packagec-plus-plus-17cranrc-plus-plus
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