Sam Pottinger
Senior Research Data Scientist Software Engineer
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSam Pottinger is a Senior Research Data Scientist and Software Engineer with 13 years of cross-disciplinary experience spanning machine learning, data visualization, user-centered design, and large-scale data engineering. Based in the Bay Area, he has led and grown teams at startups and corporations—shaping software strategy, UX research, and foundational data pipelines at organizations like Plenty, Apple, IDEO, and Clara Foods. His work bridges research and production: from ML for search and agronomy to visualization research on early language acquisition (his thesis) and contributions to well-known open-source projects such as Processing 4. Sam combines hands-on engineering (Spark/Hive/Hadoop, Java/OpenJDK) with product-minded design, has two patent filings in indoor agriculture, and has been featured in Visual Simplexity. He’s particularly drawn to the intersection of data science and UX, translating complex datasets into actionable, human-centered tools.
13 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, 3.94, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, 3.94 at University of Colorado at Boulder
Github Skills (5)
javas10
openjdk10
antlr10
java10
build-system9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
benfry/processing4
Oct 2019 - Jan 2023
Processing 4.x releases for Java 17
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 reviews, 292 commits, 94 PRs in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Sam's commits primarily focus on migrating the `benfry/processing4` repository to Java 11 and OpenJDK, addressing changes related to OpenJFX, JEPs, and build system modifications. They implemented features supporting multi-line string literals, and made improvements to the preprocessor service, including allowing the user to override some code-generation behavior. Furthermore, the user refactored and streamlined code related to the creation of runtime paths, simplifying the codebase. The commits also include the resolution of an issue where the pixelDensity code was being run in static context, and the handling of the PDF renderer in the settings section.
javajava-17
SchmidtDSE/maize-loss-climate-experiment
Aug 2024 - Apr 2025
Contributions:160 PRs, 662 pushes, 159 branches in 7 months
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