Phil Elson
Software Engineer
Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Summary
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RockstarPhil Elson is a seasoned software engineer based in Geneva with 14 years of hands-on experience in scientific and infrastructure-focused open-source projects. He combines back-end expertise, test automation, and DevOps chops—contributing to high-profile projects like setuptools, conda, matplotlib and JPype—to improve build systems, packaging, and cross-language bridges. Phil has a strong track record of making tooling more reliable and automatable, from CI integrations in conda-smithy to fixing subtle memory leaks and deferred interface checks in JPype. He also contributes front-end and documentation improvements, for example designing the initial conda-forge landing page and enhancing Cartopy docs, showing an ability to span full-stack concerns. Colleagues would note his pragmatic focus on reproducible builds and robust testing, plus an inclination to surface clearer warnings and metadata handling that prevent downstream surprises. Practical, detail-oriented, and community-minded, he excels at turning complex scientific and packaging problems into maintainable code and processes.
14 years of coding experience
Github Skills (67)
conda-build10
restructuredtext10
python10
package-management10
php-java-bridge10
testing10
command-line-interface10
scriptingbridge10
metadata10
javas10
react-native-bridge10
cython10
build-automation10
data-handling10
conda-forge10
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
SciTools/cartopy
Aug 2012 - Mar 2020
Cartopy - a cartographic python library with matplotlib support
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:6 releases, 681 commits, 258 PRs in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Phil's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the documentation for the Cartopy project. Their commits added examples, documentation regarding a new release, and also made general improvements to the documentation formatting and structure. This included re-organizing sections, adding descriptive text, and providing examples of usage.
python-librarycartopypythongeographyspatial
SciTools/iris
Aug 2012 - Jun 2018
A powerful, format-agnostic, and community-driven Python package for analysing and visualising Earth science data
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Data Analyst
Back-end Developer & Data AnalystContributions:7 releases, 1 review, 528 commits in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Phil contributed to the Iris library by fixing unit usage issues within the GRIB save rules, making warning messages more explicit to the user. They updated the system tests to reflect changes to the file type, improving the overall system's testing capability. The user demonstrated proficiency in data analysis and earth science data by working with the processing of a data analysis Python package.
pythonvisualisationagnosticgribatmosphere
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