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Nick Strayer
As a software developer I use my background in data science to build tools to help people explore, understand, and work with their data better. I have made visualizations viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, sped up query times for 25 terabytes of data by an average of 4,800 times, and built packages for R that let you do magic.
Selected Industry Experience
Principal Software Engineer
Posit
Remote
Current - 2024
- Architect and develop full-stack solutions for the Positron data science IDE
- Worked across the Typescript, Python, and Rust codebase to build user-centric interfaces that balance performance with intuitive design
- Collaborate across teams to ensure reliable, maintainable codebase architecture
- Mentored junior developers on frontend best practices and code quality standards
Senior Software Engineer
Posit
Remote
2024 - 2023
- Created and led development of ShinyUiEditor, a React-based drag-and-drop interface builder
- Designed architecture for real-time previewing and component manipulation using custom psuedo-ast format that allowed translation into either R or Python from the same ast.
- Spearheaded work to simplift and unify the UI layer of R and Shiny using custom webcomponents.
Software Engineer
Posit
Remote
2023 - 2020
- Part of team who created Shiny for Python, a ground-up rewrite of R’s Shiny framework in Python
Data Journalist - Graphics Department
New York Times
New York, New York
2016
- Reporter with the graphics desk covering topics in science, politics, and sport.
- Work primarily done in R, Javascript, and Adobe Illustrator.
- Developed interactive, data-dense visualizations viewed by hundreds of thousands of users
Education
PhD., Biostatistics
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN
2020
- Disertation: Network analysis and visualization for electronic health records data.
- Specialized in creating high-performance interactive visualization platforms
- Developed algorithms for efficient real-time network data processing
B.S., Mathematics, Statistics (minor C.S.)
University of Vermont
Burlington, VT
2015
- Thesis: An agent based model of Diel Vertical Migration patterns of Mysis diluviana
- Focused on computational efficiency, simulation optimization, and interactive model exploration
Selected Data Science Writing
The Great Student Migration
The New York Times
N/A
2016
- Most shared NYT article of August 2016, demonstrating ability to create engaging UIs.
- Used d3.js to realtime render 100 maps for personalized inspection for readers.
Using AWK and R to Parse 25tb
LiveFreeOrDichotomize.com
N/A
2019
- Achieved 4,800x performance improvement for large-scale genomic data processing.
- Reached top of HackerNews multiple times