Romain François
President R Consultant at tada.science
Montpellier, Occitania, France
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inR Data Science and Visualization
Romain François is an experienced R-focused software engineer and consultant with 17 years delivering high-quality data science tooling, now leading his own consultancy from Montpellier. He spent five years on the tidyverse team at Posit and has deep back-end expertise across flagship projects such as RStudio and Apache Arrow, contributing C++/R improvements that touch package building, fast CSV parsing, memory-mapped I/O and SQL translation for dbplyr. Known for bridging R with other languages and low-level internals, he optimizes core data structures (tibble, vctrs) and enhances developer ergonomics like autocomplete and data viewers. His background in statistics grounds his pragmatic approach to API design and parsing performance, and he regularly applies curiosity-driven experimentation to solve practical data problems.
17 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Maitrise en Statistiques, Maitrise en Statistiques at Université des Sciences et Techniques du Languedoc (Montpellier II)Statisticien, Statisticien at ISUP
English
Stackoverflow
17,552reputation
795kreached
217answers
4questions
r
top-1%
dplyr
top-5%
rename
top-5%
Github Skills (41)
database-api10
c-language10
data-conversion10
csv-parse10
apidoc10
r10
package-development10
databases10
data-structure10
apache-arrow10
dplyr10
api10
fileio10
file-processing10
csv-parsing10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
tidyverse/dbplyr
Oct 2013 - Apr 2021
Database (DBI) backend for dplyr
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Data Scientist
Back-end Developer & Data ScientistContributions:649 commits, 3 PRs, 2 pushes in 7 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Romain's contributions primarily focus on building and modifying functions related to database interaction, particularly within the context of the `dbplyr` package, which serves as a database backend for `dplyr`. They have developed functions to translate R expressions into SQL, adding features such as handling attributes of data objects and incorporating new mathematical functions. They also worked on adapting existing functions like `filter`, `mutate` and `arrange` to utilize the `DataDots` functionality. Furthermore, the user made improvements to the performance of joins within the codebase.
backenddatabasedbidplyrr
tidyverse/readr
Jul 2013 - Jul 2019
Read flat files (csv, tsv, fwf) into R
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:124 commits, 2 PRs, 2 pushes in 6 years
Contributions summary:Romain contributed to the `readr` repository, which focuses on reading flat files into R. Their commits demonstrate work on building a fast CSV parser, initially using the Boost Tokenizer library. Later commits show the user refactoring to create custom file reader to improve parsing performance and adding the ability to specify data types for the columns and include parsing for dates and POSIXct. The user benchmarked different approaches and included methods to parse integers, doubles, strings, and dates.
csvtsvsasparsingcsv-files
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