Peter Koppstein
Senior Research Specialist at Princeton University
West Windsor, New Jersey, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPeter Koppstein is a Senior Research Specialist at Princeton University with 17 years of technical experience and a long career bridging research computing, bioinformatics, and instructional technology. He has deep back-end engineering chops demonstrated by substantial contributions to the widely used jq JSON processor—adding regex-based filters and utility functions that improve data manipulation capabilities. At Princeton he evolved from scientific programmer to senior research specialist, applying software engineering rigor to academic research problems and educational tech for over a decade. His background also includes systems engineering at Telcordia/Bellcore, giving him strong foundations in large-scale systems and reliability. Unusually for someone in research IT, he pairs an MA in International Relations with hands-on open-source development, reflecting a cross-disciplinary curiosity and ability to translate complex domain needs into practical tooling.
17 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
MA, International Relations, MA, International Relations at Yale University
Github Skills (13)
regular-expression10
json10
jsonp10
jq10
jsonb10
data-structure9
algorithm9
data-structures9
algorithms9
command-line-interface8
cli8
command-line8
functional-programming7
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
jqlang/jq
Jul 2014 - Feb 2017
Command-line JSON processor
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:39 reviews, 14 commits, 45 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Peter primarily contributed to the core functionality of the `jq` command-line JSON processor. Their work involved implementing regular expression filters, including `scan`, `split`, `sub`, and `gsub`, and enhancing the existing `match` and `capture` functions. The user also added new functions like `transpose`, `ascii_upcase`, and `ascii_downcase`, and refactored existing functions such as `bsearch` for improved efficiency. These modifications directly enhanced the tool's capabilities for processing and manipulating JSON data.
command-line-tooljsonpathjqfileformatcommand-line
pkoppstein/jm
Oct 2022 - Mar 2023
Contributions:35 commits, 29 pushes, 1 branch in 5 months
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