Hello and Welcome
I'm Justin Quick — software developer and technologist.
2026 marks my 20th year in the field. I've spent two decades building and contributing to open-source technologies that power organizations and communities worldwide, with work spanning scalable web applications, developer tooling, and cloud infrastructure.
Skills
My technical foundation is built on 20 years of Python & Django and Linux systems administration, complemented by deep expertise in relational databases, REST APIs, and JavaScript. Over the years that's broadened into DevOps — CI/CD pipelines, containerization with Docker and Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure on AWS — as well as business intelligence and data analytics. I'm comfortable across the full stack, from schema design and query optimization to frontend polish, and I bring an Agile mindset to everything I ship. See the full skills breakdown.
Open-Source Projects
I've been writing open-source software since college. django-activity-stream is my most widely adopted project — a Django implementation of the Activity Streams protocol with tens of thousands of daily PyPI downloads — and I contributed to the spec alongside the W3C Social Web Working Group. Earlier work includes GChartWrapper, a Python charting library adopted across the web, and python-googlevoice, a reverse-engineered Google Voice API client. Browse all projects.
Work Experience
I'm currently Head of Software at C4ADS, where I lead engineering on a platform for investigating illicit networks and financial crime. Before that I spent five years as Principal IT Technologist at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute, building CI/CD and cloud infrastructure for Hubble and James Webb science operations. My career also includes senior engineering roles at National Geographic Society, where I led the Your Shot photo-sharing community, and founding-CTO work at Gnarwhal Studios spanning fifteen years. See the full work history.