About
I'm Jim. Born and raised in Minneapolis, MN, currently working for Voltron Data in Austin, TX.
Background
I used to be a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. My research was in the domain of system dynamics and controls, focused on system identification and state estimation for electro-mechanical systems. I was drawn to this field due to its inherent multidisciplinary nature — knowledge of mechanics, electronics, and software are all required. My final project was in the application of novel estimator designs to reduce the hardware requirements for actuators. Sometimes you don't need more or better sensors, just a fancier algorithm.
Projects
Projects I currently work on, or have spent a significant time on in the past include:
- Dask — a flexible parallel computing framework
- Distributed — a lightweight library for distributed computing
- Dask-Gateway — deploy Dask clusters as a service
- Skein — a tool and library for easy deployment on Apache YARN
- Dask-Yarn — a library for deploying dask on Apache YARN
- Dask-SearchCV — hyper-parameter search using Scikit-Learn and Dask
- Conda-Pack — a tool for packaging Conda environments for redistribution
- JupyterHub-on-Hadoop — docs for deploying JupyterHub on Hadoop
- Yarnspawner — a spawner for running JupyterHub on Hadoop
- Kerberosauthenticator — an authenticator for JupyterHub using Kerberos
- hdfscm — a Contents-Manager for storing Jupyter notebooks in HDFS
- hadoop-test-cluster — tools for testing on realistic Hadoop Clusters
- Crick — streaming and approximate algorithms
- Datashader — a bin-based rendering toolchain
- SymPy — a computer algebra system written in Python
- PyDy — tools for dynamic systems analysis, in Python
- ControlSystems.jl — a control systems toolbox for Julia
Other Interests
I spend my free time on my hobbies. I started rock climbing around 10 years ago, and that has easily become the most addicting thing in my life. I also dabble in woodworking, crocheting, gardening, baking, and homebrewing.