Ricky O'steen
Senior Software Engineer at Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRicky O'steen is a Senior Software Engineer with seven years of experience blending physics-trained analytical rigor (M.S., UNC Chapel Hill) with production-grade data engineering on DARPA and space-science programs. Based in Baltimore, he currently develops data science solutions at the Space Telescope Science Institute, having progressed from hands-on scientific software and data-science roles supporting telescope pipelines to senior engineering work. He has deep Python expertise in scientific data formats (GRIB, NetCDF, raster, FITS) and cloud migration patterns, and has applied ML techniques for real-world problems like crop yield and outage prediction. An active open-source contributor, Ricky improved chunking/subsetting reliability in glue-viz and strengthened test coverage in the widely used astropy astronomy library, showing attention to both correctness and reproducibility. He brings field-tested operational experience—from on-site telescope installs that preserved costly observing time to productionizing pipelines on AWS—paired with a habit of mentoring and improving team onboarding. Practical, methodical, and curious, he favors robust testing and reproducible data workflows in complex scientific domains.
7 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Maryland, College ParkSouth Carroll HighMaster of Science (MS), Physics, Master of Science (MS), Physics at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (10)
astropy10
python10
astrophysics10
astronomy10
data-science10
numpy10
test-automation10
testing10
visualizations9
visualization9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
glue-viz/glue
Jun 2020 - Jun 2022
Linked Data Visualizations Across Multiple Files
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 9 commits, 6 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Ricky primarily focused on improving the data chunking and subsetting functionality within the glue-viz/glue repository, which involves handling data visualizations across multiple files. Their contributions include implementing fixes for subset chunking issues, removing and adding checks related to subset states, and addressing codestyle. They also added and applied suggestions from code reviews and contributed to the test suite to improve reliability and test coverage.
linked-datavisualizationspythonvisualizationdata-science
astropy/astropy
Mar 2020 - Apr 2020
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:6 reviews, 7 commits, 4 PRs in 9 days
Contributions summary:Ricky primarily focused on enhancing the testing framework for the astropy library, particularly for the spectral coordinate module. Their contributions include adding tests to cover specific use cases and potential bug scenarios, such as duplicating spectral coordinate parameters and the internal storage of bin edges. They also addressed and fixed existing test failures, ultimately improving the robustness and reliability of the spectral coordinate functionality within the astropy library. Additionally, the user added tests for the spectral_axis module.
core-librarypythonastronomyscienceastrophysics
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