Technical Projects

Major examples of infrastructure and development work since 2021.

2025
MorphoSource 5.0.0 release — Led development team through a series of major infrastructural upgrades, including a 3.0.0 release in 2024. These major version increments track changes in the underlying Hyrax digital repository framework and are prerequisites for forthcoming object storage and metadata preservation improvements.
2025
Anubis bot protection — Implemented Anubis bot protection layer in front of the MorphoSource repository application, successfully maintaining site performance in response to unprecedented waves of automated anonymous scraping.
2024
Kubernetes containerized deployment — Transitioned MorphoSource to a containerized, horizontally scalable deployment on a Kubernetes (K8s) OKD OpenShift cluster. Work included authoring Helm Charts, coordinating with OIT K8s team members, adapting deployment configuration, and stress-testing infrastructure to maximize response times and user capacity.
2021
Financial billing and Duke Exchequer integration — Introduced financial billing reports to MorphoSource with Duke Exchequer integration, associating repository media with fund code groups and tracking funds remaining and storage consumed. Monthly charge reports are consumed by Exchequer to transfer funds accurately based on data usage.
2021
Streaming ZIP downloads — Created a solution for streaming downloads to end users, enabling immediate download of ZIP archives containing arbitrary assortments of reposited media files and auto-generated metadata. Adapted from open-source code published by WeTransfer, requiring direct coordination with WeTransfer staff to implement.
Software, APIs & Data Specifications
2023
International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) — APIs, data specifications, and IIIF-Commons tools. Specification editor, developer. github.com/IIIF · github.com/IIIF-Commons
2019
Aleph and Aleph-R3F — Open-source 3D viewers for mesh and volume data with annotation and measurement support. Developer, maintainer. github.com/aleph-viewer
2017
MorphoSource 3D Data Repository — GitHub organization with 28 repositories supporting the MorphoSource platform. Creator, developer, maintainer. github.com/MorphoSource
2018
ToothAndClaw — GitHub organization maintaining software output of the Daubechies integrative biology and math working group, including auto3dgm for Python and auto3dgm Slicer Extension. Creator, developer. github.com/toothAndClaw
2015
molaR — An R package for quantitative topographic analysis. Developer. CRAN: molaR
2015
MorphoTester — Open-source freeware platform for quantification of topographic shape in 3D data. Creator, developer. morphotester.apotropa.com
2015
Personal GitHub — 70 repositories reflecting professional and personal development projects. Creator, developer, maintainer. github.com/JulieWinchester
Technical Skills

Team Lead / Product Management

  • Agile development methodology (sprint timeboxing, planning poker, user stories)
  • Issue tracking (Jira, Trello)
  • Scrum leadership and team mentorship
  • Grant writing and management
  • Hiring, supervision, and evaluation
  • Management of contract developers

Full Stack Web Development

  • Front end core technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)
  • Front end frameworks (React, jQuery, Angular)
  • UI frameworks (Angular Material, Bootstrap 3 & 4)
  • Mobile/responsive development
  • Web 3D and graphics (Three.js, WebGL, Paper.js, Raphael)
  • Back end (Node, Ruby, PHP, Python)
  • Server-rendered frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Python Flask)

DevOps

  • Automated CI/CD pipelines (GitHub, GitLab)
  • Application containerization (Docker)
  • Container orchestration (Docker Compose, Kubernetes, OKD/OpenShift, Portainer)

Database

  • Core technologies (SQL)
  • Database management systems (PostgreSQL, Redis/NoSQL)
  • Database design and administration

Natural History Data Resources

  • Specimen databases (Specify, Arctos, Symbiota)
  • Data aggregators (iDigBio, GBIF, Europeana, IPT)
  • Discipline-specific databases (MorphoSource, Paleobiology Database)
  • Taxonomic databases (GBIF Backbone, Catalog of Life, WoRMS)

Metadata & Structured Data

  • Metadata term sets (Dublin Core, Darwin Core, Audiovisual Core, DICOM, EXIF)
  • OWL-format data ontologies (MorphoSource Data Vocabulary, Uberon Anatomy Ontology)

Repository Development

  • Hyrax repository application (Samvera, Fedora, Redis, Blacklight, Rails)
  • MorphoSource 2.0.0+ platform (significantly customized Hyrax)
  • MorphoSource v1.0 (CollectiveAccess, LAMP stack)

Software Design

  • Software architecture and modeling
  • Metadata modeling
  • Web front end UI/UX design (Justinmind)

Data Science & Analytics

  • Numerical/analytical programming (MATLAB, R, Python)
  • Python packages (NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, scikit-learn)
  • Data visualization (Jupyter, Matplotlib, Plotly, Bokeh, ggplot)
  • Parallel computing (Spark, Sun Grid Engine)

Desktop App Development

  • Python application development (PyQt, Tkinter, Traits, Mayavi)