Mara Averick is a Senior Developer Advocate with over 15 years of experience helping teams and communities get more value from data through inclusive documentation, accessible design, and hands-on training. She spent 5.5 years at RStudio growing the tidyverse community to hundreds of thousands of users, created contribution frameworks that tripled new contributors, and ensures open-source tools meet WCAG standards. A prolific technical writer and full‑stack contributor across projects like tidyr, dplyr, quarto-web, and usethis, she combines meticulous documentation work with practical examples that make complex APIs approachable. Based in Missoula, Montana, she also runs a consulting practice that blends training, product design, and real‑time data visualizations for commercial clients. Known for building feedback systems that connect users to product teams, she brings a rare mix of community building, pedagogy, and engineering craftsmanship.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Honors B.A. Science and Technology Studies, Honors B.A. Science and Technology Studies at Brown University
The Waring School
The Mountain School
Oceanography Nautical Science Maritime Studies, Oceanography Nautical Science Maritime Studies at Sea Education Association
Contributions:2 reviews, 63 commits, 22 PRs in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Mara focused on documentation and configuration within the tidyverse repository. The contributions include fixing a typo in the `tidyverse_deps` function documentation, adding move bot configuration files, and adapting the JSS template for paper rendering, demonstrating attention to detail and a focus on enhancing the project's documentation and build processes. The user's work aimed to improve the clarity and usability of the project's documentation and integration with external tools.
Contributions:28 commits, 33 PRs, 5 pushes in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Mara primarily focused on enhancing the `usethis` package, particularly around improving the integration with GitHub and streamlining the development workflow for R packages. They implemented features for generating standard GitHub templates like `CONTRIBUTING.md`, `ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md`, and `SUPPORT.md`, and for organizing these files within a `.github` directory. They also contributed to styling and formatting code within the package.
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