Max Jones
Founding Editorial Board Member at Development Seed
Durham, North Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMax Jones is a cloud engineer and founding editorial board member with a decade of experience applying cloud-native tooling to Earth science problems. With a PhD in Geological Oceanography from MIT and a background spanning oceanography and volcanology, he transitions domain research into production-ready infrastructure. He has held roles from postdoctoral research at UH Manoa and WHOI to leading open-source efforts at CarbonPlan and cloud engineering at Development Seed. An active contributor to the widely used Generic Mapping Tools ecosystem, he has improved PyGMT and GMT internals and documentation to make geospatial plotting more accessible. Max combines rigorous scientific training with practical backend development and technical writing, often surfacing usability gains that help researchers and engineers alike. Based in Durham, NC, he builds tools that bridge complex Earth data and scalable cloud workflows.
10 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Geological Oceanography, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Geological Oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Science - BS, Majors: Marine Science, Geological Sciences; Minors: Mathematics, Classics, Bachelor of Science - BS, Majors: Marine Science, Geological Sciences; Minors: Mathematics, Classics at University of Miami
Github Skills (9)
c1710
mappings10
c1110
python10
documentation10
restructuredtext9
geoscience9
maps9
geospatial8
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
GenericMappingTools/pygmt
Feb 2021 - Dec 2022
A Python interface for the Generic Mapping Tools.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Technical Writer
Back-end Developer & Technical WriterContributions:572 reviews, 156 commits, 182 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Max primarily contributed to improving the PyGMT library's documentation and functionality. Their work included updating docstrings in multiple plotting modules, enhancing the documentation of functions like `x2sys_init` and `x2sys_cross`, and fixing typos in tutorials. They also implemented improvements like adding alias annotations and expanding table-like input options for specific plotting methods. These changes enhanced the usability and clarity of the library for users.
seismologypythongeophysicsgeneric-mapping-toolspython-interface
GenericMappingTools/gmt
Dec 2020 - Dec 2022
The Generic Mapping Tools
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 758 reviews, 280 commits in 2 years
Contributions summary:Max made several contributions focused on improving the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) codebase. This included fixing bugs, such as handling path truncation in `gmt_chop_ext` and correcting typos in the documentation. Furthermore, the user implemented new features, specifically adding options to `MAP_FRAME_AXES` and updating documentation descriptions. They also made edits related to updating links to file formats and listing arguments that read stdin.
geospatialgeophysicsgeneric-mapping-toolsgenericmapping
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