About

Hi, I'm James Martin

I build software for a living. I am a backend software engineer by trade with a research background in Computer Science. Occasionally, I moonlight as a copyeditor for Superorganism.

I spend a lot of time away from a keyboard - I'm a big fan of the sun. While living in Central Texas, I started an adventure cycling team with my buddy Cole named Ruffy Tuffy Crew. I'm a bike and gear nerd, love trail running, and cook almost every meal with my partner Ariana. I enjoy eclectic music, simple board games, and athletics - especially basketball and World Tour pro cycling. I love the intersection of design and all of these things.

Technology

I'm comfortable working with backend technologies and data pipelines. I specialize in writing portable code for reproducible environments, and I most enjoy working with Docker, Kubernetes, nginx, node, Python, Apache Airflow, and Jupyter. I'm happy tinkering with both digital and physical technologies.

I spent time in an emerging technology research and development group at IBM and as an engineer at Under Armour Connected Fitness. At IBM, I had the opportunity to work with some wonderful, smart people to automate training and deployment of machine learning models. At Under Armour, I worked on almost all parts of two mobile app ecosystems, MapMyFitness and MyFitnessPal. I also product tested and provided feedback for the HOVR line of connected running footwear.

I'm currently on the Backend Foundations team at Guild Education. I apply a combination of Guild-specific domain knowledge with my experience with AWS, serverless, and application programming to help our engineering organization stay aligned with best practices. My day-to-day involves research, coordination efforts, product management, and execution to provide resources for teams to effectively bootstrap and improve their projects.

Research

My research in graduate school, BS/MS in Computer Science, UNC Chapel Hill 2016, explored the intersection of data science, application development, and accessibility. The output of my graduate thesis was nbreader, an accessibility add-on for Project Jupyter.

About this site

jameslmart.in is a blog of my thoughts on a variety of topics built with Pelican and some personally managed infrastructure. Most images are grainy because they are dithered to reduce file size with a Pelican plugin built by the good people at LOW←TECH MAGAZINE. Thanks for taking a look!

Reach out

Feel free to send me mail at hi [at] jameslmart.in or drop me a message on LinkedIn.