Rob Norris
Software Engineer at Gemini Observatory
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarRob Norris is a pragmatic software engineer with 13 years of experience, based in Austin, Texas, who brands himself a "minimum viable programmer" yet contributes to sophisticated, widely used Scala libraries. He has deep functional-programming chops demonstrated by substantive contributions to high-profile projects like http4s, scalaz, cats, and wartremover—improving typeclass encoding/decoding, safer data structures, and linting rules. Rob’s work shows a strong emphasis on type-safety, API clarity, and testable refactors rather than surface features, and he frequently touches core library internals to reduce deprecation debt and strengthen abstractions. Colleagues can expect a back-end specialist who balances minimalism with rigorous functional design and quietly levels up the projects he touches.
13 years of coding experience
Github Skills (17)
typeclass10
testing10
http10
data-structure10
scala10
code-analysis10
linter10
data-structures10
cat10
functional-programming10
datatypes9
macros9
monads9
io8
scalaz7
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
typelevel/cats
Feb 2015 - Feb 2018
Lightweight, modular, and extensible library for functional programming.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 reviews, 13 commits, 14 PRs in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Rob primarily focused on enhancing the documentation and internal structure of the `cats` library. They added index pages and updated the documentation, including adding tutorial examples, and corrected code. The user also modified the `Free` and `Kleisli` data types and syntax, and incorporated the `ContravariantCoyoneda` functionality. Furthermore, they upgraded the version of the tut-plugin.
functional-programmingtagless-finalscalamodularextensible
http4s/http4s
Jul 2017 - Sep 2021
A minimal, idiomatic Scala interface for HTTP
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits, 8 PRs, 27 comments in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Rob primarily contributed to the `http4s/http4s` repository by modifying the core codebase related to `QueryParam`. These changes involved implementing `QueryParamEncoder` and `QueryParamDecoder` typeclasses, including contravariant and functor instances, to handle encoding and decoding query parameters. Furthermore, the user refactored and updated the codebase by removing deprecated methods and adding testing functionalities. The changes demonstrate a focus on improving the library's internal type-system.
idiomatichttp-clientscalafs2typelevel
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