Winston Chang
Software Engineer at Posit PBC
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inR Data Science and Visualization
Winston Chang is a software engineer with 14 years building developer-facing, open-source tools at Posit (formerly RStudio), focused on bridging R and modern web technologies. His work spans backend reactivity and package tooling (py-shiny, devtools, pkgdown, usethis) to frontend integrations and interactive graphics (shiny, leaflet, htmlwidgets, ggplot2), showing fluency across the full stack. He has a strong track record of improving cross-browser compatibility, test suites, and developer workflows—often fixing subtle integration bugs and adding pragmatic features like caching for Shiny widgets and CRAN-friendly checks. Comfortable in both research and production contexts (PhD-level training in cognitive psychology), he brings a user-centered, data-savvy perspective to developer tooling. Based in Minneapolis, he quietly powers widely used projects that make reproducible science and interactive visualization simpler for practitioners.
14 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Psychology, Computer Science, Mathematics, Bachelor of Science - BS, Psychology, Computer Science, Mathematics at University of Wisconsin-MadisonMaster's program, Philosophy, Master's program, Philosophy at Tufts UniversityPh.D., Cognitive Psychology, Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology at Northwestern University
Stackoverflow
4,087reputation
191kreached
36answers
13questions
r
top-5%
Github Skills (66)
dependency-management10
dashboard10
python10
testing10
data-manipulation10
bash10
knitr10
bootstra10
namespaces10
ggplot10
bookdown10
environmental10
javascript10
r10
shiny10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
posit-dev/py-shiny
Jul 2021 - Jan 2023
Shiny for Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 releases, 289 reviews, 565 commits in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Winston made several contributions to the py-shiny project, including implementing new features, refactoring, and fixing bugs. Their work focused on improving the framework's core functionality, particularly in the area of reactivity and file uploads. The user implemented support for modules, which improved code organization. Furthermore, they changed the rendering of elements to improve user experience and support for passing parameters to render plots.
interfacesvoilashinypython
rstudio/shiny
Oct 2012 - Jan 2023
Easy interactive web applications with R
Role in this project:Backend Developer & UI Developer
Backend Developer & UI DeveloperContributions:407 reviews, 2477 commits, 734 PRs in 10 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Winston primarily worked on the Shiny application's test suite, fixing existing tests for the `coordmap` plot functionality. The user also contributed to the application's functionality by implementing code improvements and adding the "replay" option to the renderPlot function. They have made contributions which suggests some involvement with UI elements in the app.
web-applicationsweb-appshinyrstudioweb-development
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