Oscar Dowson
Research Software Engineer at Self-employed
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolOscar Dowson is a Research Software Engineer based in Auckland with 11 years of experience building and maintaining numerical and optimization tooling in Julia and C. A JuMP core contributor and self-employed since 2020, he combines deep academic training (PhD in Engineering Science) with hands-on engineering—contributing to projects like BinaryBuilder/Yggdrasil, Documenter.jl, Optimization.jl, and the HiGHS solver C API. His work spans build/release engineering, solver interfaces, and documentation generators, demonstrating attention to reproducible builds, API usability, and numerical correctness. Notably, he has expanded solver C APIs and automated complex dependency builds so libraries can be reliably exposed to higher-level packages.
12 years of coding experience
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Engineering Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Engineering Science at The University of Auckland
Github Skills (19)
dependency-management10
git10
mixed-integer-programming10
build-system10
capi10
c1110
c1710
documentation-generator10
pbuilder10
julia10
optimization10
nonlinear-optimization-algorithms9
markdown9
continuous-integration9
convex-optimization9
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
JuliaDocs/Documenter.jl
Jun 2018 - Jan 2023
A documentation generator for Julia.
Role in this project:
Technical Writer & Developer
Technical Writer & DeveloperContributions:40 reviews, 26 commits, 31 PRs in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Oscar primarily contributed to improving the documentation generator by addressing issues related to LaTeX and HTML output. They fixed bugs in the LaTeXWriter related to headers, MIME types, and code block styling, and added styling for tables and admonitions. They also documented and implemented features for HTML output, such as the collapselevel argument and escaping dollar signs.
documentation-generatorjuliadocumentation-tool
JuliaPackaging/Yggdrasil
Apr 2020 - Dec 2022
Collection of builder repositories for BinaryBuilder.jl
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Build/Release Engineer
Back-end Developer & Build/Release EngineerContributions:134 reviews, 79 commits, 182 PRs in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Oscar primarily contributed to the build system and dependencies within the BinaryBuilder.jl project. Their work involved updating and bumping versions of various COIN-OR libraries, including Clp, Ipopt, Cbc, and others. They also added initial builders for new packages like Couenne, and ALPS, and worked on exposing libraries for use by other packages. These changes involved modifying build scripts and configuration files to incorporate new versions, dependencies, and build options.
repositoriesbinarybuildermonorepobuilderjulia
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