About Dane

Dane Hillard is a software engineer and web developer interested in education, biotechnology, and open source.

Dane has a B.S.E. in computer engineering with a minor in mathematics from the University of Michigan. As a software engineer, Dane has worked on intelligence research and development at SAIC (now Leidos) and personalized cancer genomics at Compendia Bioscience (now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific). As a lead web application developer at ITHAKA, his focus is mainly on web development in Python, Django, and front-end technologies to enable academic research.

Dane grew up in Michigan and currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Portrait of Dane Hillard

I wrote a book!

After much ado, Practices of the Python Pro is now available for purchase through Manning Books.

This book is geared toward people just getting into software development, or using Python as a supplement to their work in a different discipline. Please share with anyone looking to learn more about software development principles and best practices!

Book cover for Practices of the Python Pro by Dane Hillard

Projects

I like to make things. Some of the projects below were for school or work, but I chose to make them because they were fun and challenging. Go build something!

  • pixelize project screenshot
    pixelize

    pixelize is a tool to make glitch art from source images.

  • Screenshot of apiron GitHub page
    apiron

    apiron is a Python library for building RESTful API clients. We built this at ITHAKA to speed up development and interact with our internal services more consistently.

  • Screenshot of the Mondrian collection on CodePen
    Mondrian

    A collection of Mondrian works recreated in CSS Grid

  • Guitar
    ToneShift

    Our 2007 senior design project at the University of Michigan to build a pitch-shifting device for electric guitars. For contemporary work in this area see Guitar Pitch Shifter or Alan Pagliere's work on lap steel guitar tunings.