Joshua Tauberer
Head Of Product Development at GovTrack.us
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoshua Tauberer is a civic hacker and seasoned software leader with two decades of experience, currently Head of Product Development at LARSA in Washington, DC, where he grows technical teams and delivers industry-leading scientific engineering software. As founder of GovTrack and an active open-source contributor to projects like unitedstates/congress, congress-legislators, mail-in-a-box, and django-silk, he built the first comprehensive open API for roughly 400,000 congressional bills and helped prompt Congress to publish official bulk data and APIs. He combines hands-on backend and DevOps expertise—implementing parsers, caching large YAML datasets, PDF text extraction and redaction, and reliable mail server infrastructure—with product leadership and novel algorithms for structural analysis. Beyond engineering, he has influenced policy through testimony and a foundational book on open government data, and brings unusual breadth from graduate work in linguistics to large-scale civic platforms.
21 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
MA, Linguistics, MA, Linguistics at University of PennsylvaniaAB, Psychology, AB, Psychology at Princeton University
Hebrew, English
Github Skills (40)
python10
django10
post10
data-serialization10
data-parsing10
data-management10
pdf-parsing10
serialization10
regular-expression10
dns10
performance-optimization10
postfix-notation10
profiling10
yaml10
regular-expressions10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
mail-in-a-box/mailinabox
Aug 2013 - Jan 2023
Mail-in-a-Box helps individuals take back control of their email by defining a one-click, easy-to-deploy SMTP+everything else server: a mail server in a box.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:31 releases, 31 reviews, 1288 commits in 9 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Joshua's commits reveal a focus on improving the infrastructure and functionality of the mail server. Primarily, the user refactored the backup script to utilize the duplicity program, introduced changes related to setting and checking DNS records, enabling the use of TLS, and expanding the size of the Postfix message. Additionally, the user contributed to setting up Nextcloud functionality and the web interface for the project. The user was involved in the overall reliability and management of the email server by contributing on different aspects of the project.
everythingdovecotdkimdisposablemailbox
unitedstates/congress-legislators
Sep 2012 - Jan 2023
Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML/JSON/CSV, as well as committees, presidents, and vice presidents.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 694 commits, 379 PRs in 10 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Joshua focused on optimizing the performance of the YAML loading process in the repository by caching it in a pickled format. They implemented a caching mechanism that utilized file hashing to ensure the cached data matched the YAML content, significantly improving the speed of data loading. Furthermore, the user made modifications to various scripts to update and add entries for the 113th Congress, 116th Congress and the most recent election results. They demonstrated proficiency in Python and utilized YAML and CSV formats for data management.
csvcongressmemberscsv-jsonjson
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