Be careful with your tool schemas
A lesson in how the names of parameters in agent tool schemas can influence performance in surprising ways
Software Engineer and Data Scientist
I am a principal software engineer at Posit, building a new AI-native Jupyter notebook experience for the Positron IDE.
At Posit , I lead development of a new Jupyter notebook experience in Positron—a next-generation data science IDE. My career spans multiple disciplines—from being a journalist at the New York Times to a data scientist at Johns Hopkins Data Science Lab and even a "data artist in residence" at a geospatial visualization startup.
My Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University focused on statistical methodologies for network data, deep learning, and data visualization. At the University of Vermont, I studied statistics, mathematics, and computer science.
When I am not in "work mode," I enjoy photographing birds and my daughter, running and hiking, reading science fiction, and contributing to open-source projects.
Short notes on software, data, visualization, and things learned along the way.
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A next-generation, language-agnostic data science IDE and spiritual successor to RStudio, built by Posit to unify data exploration, analysis, and production workflows
Serving as tech lead for the Jupyter notebooks experience, building a completely reimagined notebook editor from the ground up
Implementing AI-native notebook interactions that integrate intelligent assistance directly into the data analysis workflow
A real-time javascript simulation of epidemic spreading on a network
Built to provide intuition for spreading in constrained environments
All parameters related to spread are tunable
An R package for building a CV/Resume from a spreadsheet of information
Built around the pagedown package in R
Framework supplied by package is entirely self-sufficient so user's are not dependent on package version changes.
Shiny app for exploring results of Phenome-Wide Association Studies (PheWAS)
Allows user to look directly at individual data generating results to identify spurious or novel associations.
Build as R package framework allowing modular construction of apps based upon a projects needs.
Full implementation and explaination of t-sne visualization algorithm
Featured in "Explorables" section of Observable
A series of small self-contained functions for doing statistical computation in javascript
Functions are optimized for speed along with legibility
A comprehensive list of my career accomplishments, publications, and experience.
Built with my own R package: github.com/nstrayer/cv