Joe Germuska
Executive Director at Knight Lab (Northwestern University)
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoe Germuska is an executive director and seasoned software leader with 17 years of experience building interdisciplinary teams that apply technology to storytelling, journalism, and public data. Based in Chicago, he leads Knight Lab at Northwestern, combining hands-on development with program management and student mentorship to sustain a prolific extracurricular engineering community. He won and led a $450K Knight News Challenge-funded Census Reporter project and has reduced operational costs while professionalizing deployment and student employment systems. A full-stack contributor and active open-source collaborator, his work includes internationalized front-end features for TimelineJS and backend tooling for csvkit and civic data scrapers. Trained in history and holding an MS in Product Design and Development Management from Northwestern, he brings a curious, collegial approach that blends research-driven product design with pragmatic engineering.
17 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Product Design and Development Management, Master of Science - MS, Product Design and Development Management at Northwestern University
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1,678reputation
283kreached
27answers
5questions
django
top-5%
django-admin
top-5%
Github Skills (47)
date-formatting10
javascript10
webscraper10
python10
testing10
scrape10
css10
scraper10
internationalization10
user-interface10
date-format10
beautifulsoup10
data-parsing10
webscraping10
refactor10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
NUKnightLab/TimelineJS3
Aug 2014 - Jan 2023
TimelineJS v3: A Storytelling Timeline built in JavaScript. http://timeline.knightlab.com
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 897 commits, 83 PRs in 8 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Joe primarily worked on implementing new date formatting features for the TimelineJS3 project, with a focus on internationalization. They introduced a new `formatDate` function and modified the `VCO.Language.js` and `VCO.Date.js` files to accommodate different date formats based on the language selected. Additionally, they added unit tests for the date formatting functions and incorporated locale files for various languages, indicating a focus on supporting international users.
javascripttimelinejs
NUKnightLab/sql-mysteries
Jan 2018 - Sep 2022
Inspired by @veltman's command-line mystery, use SQL to research clues and find out whodunit!
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:38 commits, 6 PRs, 47 pushes in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Joe primarily focused on front-end development, as demonstrated by the addition of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. The commits show the implementation of UI elements, meta tags, and the integration of external libraries like CodeMirror. Significant changes were made to the `index.html` and `walkthrough.html` files, suggesting an effort to structure content and improve user experience. This suggests a focus on adapting the project for web hosting and improving content presentation.
command-linesql
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