Martin Spacek
Development Engineer at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolMartin Spacek is a Development Engineer based in Munich with 20 years of technical experience bridging systems neuroscience and industrial control systems. Trained as a neuroscientist (PhD) and former postdoc studying millisecond-scale neural dynamics, he now applies deep expertise in data acquisition, instrumentation, and complex software development to plasma physics and decarbonization efforts at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. A hands-on contributor to major open-source projects like IPython, Matplotlib and phy, he has improved front-end UX and robust back-end data handling for large-scale electrophysiology and scientific tooling. Martin’s work often focuses on reliability under edge cases—fixing SVG/Unicode issues, large-file .npy writing, and UX shortcuts—skills directly relevant to high-integrity control systems. He combines rigorous experimental thinking with pragmatic engineering to turn research-grade methods into production-ready solutions for sustainable energy and transport electrification.
20 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Bachelor of Science - BS at University of AlbertaDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD at The University of British Columbia
English, Czech, German, French, Spanish
Stackoverflow
3,041reputation
835kreached
5answers
0questions
axis
top-1%
matplotlib
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python
top-5%
Github Skills (42)
data-visualizations10
c-language10
qt10
python10
jupyter10
electrophysiology10
ipython10
data-serialization10
data-visualisation10
axis10
ui-design10
plot10
serialization10
uid10
front-end-development10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
open-ephys/plugin-GUI
Feb 2017 - Jun 2018
Software for processing, recording, and visualizing multichannel electrophysiology data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 9 PRs, 28 comments in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Martin primarily focused on improving the software's data handling and file writing capabilities, particularly for electrophysiology data. Their contributions included fixing potential data overflow issues in the event processing pipeline. They also implemented optimizations to the .npy file writing process, adding features such as header padding, regular header updates, and fixed a data loss issue for files larger than 2GiB. The changes improved data integrity and performance in writing and processing experimental data.
connectivityneurosciencepythonmultichannelcomputational-neuroscience
matplotlib/matplotlib
May 2012 - Aug 2020
matplotlib: plotting with Python
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:37 commits, 2 PRs, 23 comments in 8 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Martin primarily focused on improving the user experience and stability of Matplotlib's plotting capabilities. Their contributions included modifying the default file saving behavior to prompt the user to overwrite existing files, enabling overwrite confirmation in the Gtk3 backend, and removing a test related to existing filenames. Furthermore, the user fixed a typo in the documentation. These changes collectively enhance the usability and reliability of the plotting functionality.
pythondata-sciencegtkdata-visualizationplotting
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