About This Blog

Hi there! My name is Jim Calabro, and I am starting a new technical coding blog here at septacat.com! I am excited to bring my perspective on software engineering online, and I hope to post very frequently about difficult problems I've been hacking at, my thoughts on new and exciting technologies, and the state of the industry including my favorite apps, websites, companies, cultures, and more!

I'm currently a student at UMass Amherst who will be graduating in May of 2016 with a CS degree. My concentration is in software systems, and I have and am currently taking advanced courses on operating systems, statistics, computer networks, software engineering, computer architecture, discrete math, databases, and information science. I have been a member of the Minuteman Marching Band in the trombone section during my time here, played the drum set in the basketball and hockey band, and I was a member of the colonial honor guard.

I've finished two internships at EMC during which I worked on a PaaS website that delivers a scalable hard drive testing infrastructure to our manufacturing pipeline that is expected to half TCO. During my time there I also completed several smaller projects including a personnel management website, a web service mock environment, a drive conversion lookup database, and various internal system debugging tools. I learned a ton about the software engineering process (we used Agile/Scrum) as well as what it's like to work on different sized teams.

For the last year and a half I’ve been working as a multi-purpose tech consultant for the Brain, Cognition, and Development lab here at UMass. I’ve been writing code for our EEG and eye-tracking experiments, doing data and statistical analytics, suggesting, setting up, and fixing hardware configurations, and managing any other technical and computational details of the lab. My most notable contributions include preparing an implementation for a study funded by the Army, coding a dissertation for a PhD candidate, and performing statistics and data analytics on large data sets.

Some of my favorite things in tech at the moment are:

• C#/.NET
• Node.js
• PostgreSQL
• CUDA
• Heroku
• Azure
• Julia

In addition to Blogger, my other online presences include:

• Github: github.com/jcalabro
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamesrcalabro
• Last.fm: last.fm/user/TheKingOfPing
• Twitter: twitter.com/jim_calabro

So that's a little bit about me! If you're reading and you find something I write about interesting or you find your self in disagreement, feel free to drop me a line or comment on a post, I will be sure to respond! Thanks for reading!

-Jim