Jeremy Merrill
Data Reporter
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJeremy Merrill is a data reporter and journalist-who-codes with 14 years of experience building investigative stories, machine-learning tools, and newsroom apps for outlets including The Washington Post, ProPublica, Quartz and The New York Times. He combines hands-on full-stack and back-end development—contributing to notable open-source projects like Tabula and SimpleNLG—with traditional reporting skills such as scraping, FOIA work, and crowdsourcing large datasets. Jeremy has led high-impact projects that changed outcomes (crowdsourced political-ad databases, a probe that helped shut down a fraud scheme) and built tooling to surface investigations, from word2vec models for congressional priorities to AI-assisted document analysis. Based in Atlanta, he blends computational linguistics and pragmatic engineering to turn messy public data into defensible, story-driven analysis.
15 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
HS, HS at North Carolina School of Science and MathematicsBachelor of Arts Linguistics and Philosophy, Bachelor of Arts Linguistics and Philosophy at Claremont McKenna CollegeThe Lerner Jewish Community Day School of Durham-Chapel Hill
Stackoverflow
33reputation
4kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (16)
text-extraction10
testing10
nokogiri10
javas10
ruby10
algorithms10
algorithm10
pdf-processing10
webscraping10
java10
caching9
url-routing6
http-post6
sqlalchemy6
database6
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
propublica/upton
Jul 2013 - Dec 2018
A batteries-included framework for easy web-scraping. Just add CSS! (Or do more.)
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:96 commits, 1 PR, 5 pushes in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Jeremy primarily contributed to the `Upton` web-scraping framework by implementing and refining URL resolution logic, including handling of relative URLs, query parameters, and page anchors. They also introduced caching mechanisms, including support for human-readable filenames, to improve performance. Additionally, the user focused on improving code style, updating dependency versions, and addressing bug fixes, while also adding the ability to sleep between requests to prevent overloading the target servers.
csswebscraping
tabulapdf/tabula-java
Apr 2015 - Jul 2019
Extract tables from PDF files
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 1 review, 29 commits in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Jeremy primarily worked on refactoring the codebase, specifically renaming namespaces and updating imports to reflect these changes. They also addressed a bug related to PDFBox logging and made several changes to support right-to-left (RTL) text rendering in the PDF extraction process. Furthermore, the user modified core classes such as `TextChunk`, `TextElement`, and `Page` to handle directionality, improve text ordering, and integrate RTL functionality. The user also renamed command line arguments.
pdf-filesextracting-tablespdfsextraction-engine
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