James Callahan
Contractor at WaveSquid
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Callahan is a pragmatic contractor and software architect with 16 years' experience building and securing distributed systems that scale to millions of concurrent users without extravagant cost. He specializes in tracking elusive bugs end-to-end—often delving from UI through VMs, standard libraries and libc into the kernel—to deliver robust, maintainable fixes. James has held senior roles at BitGo, Kong and Barracuda and led engineering at ChatID, bringing deep expertise in API gateways, service mesh, DevOps and infrastructure security. An active open-source contributor, his work spans Lua, Zig and web tooling with notable contributions to Kong, Zig and Lua ecosystem projects including HTTP/2, HPACK and Lua VM integrations. Based in Melbourne, he blends an electrical-engineering background and embedded-systems training with hands-on systems and security engineering. He often prefers low-cost, high-efficiency architectures and enjoys rescuing projects with thorny, low-level issues other engineers have abandoned.
16 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Wesley CollegeThe University of Melbourne
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (56)
xserver10
xmpp10
javascript10
filesystem10
lib10
system-programming10
package-management10
apidoc10
testing10
memory-management10
http10
openresty10
c1110
file-operations10
network-programming10
Programming languages (44)
Github contributions (5)
daurnimator/lua.vm.js
May 2014 - Sep 2016
The project is superceded by Fengari. See https://fengari.io/
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:131 commits, 4 PRs, 34 pushes in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:James's contributions primarily involved enhancing the Lua VM's functionality. They refactored the build process to use `json.dumps` for correct escaping. Further contributions involved upgrading the emscripten version and significant overhaul of JS<=>Lua interop, including creating and setting up a weakly keyed table for proxy objects. In addition, they made changes in the HTML and JS source.
lualua-vmjavascriptemscripten
daurnimator/lua-http
Mar 2015 - Jun 2021
HTTP Library for Lua. Supports HTTP(S) 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0; client and server.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 16 reviews, 1444 commits in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:James was primarily involved in the development of the HTTP library for Lua, with their work focusing on implementing features related to the HTTP/2 protocol. Their contributions included adding an HPACK implementation, which is essential for header compression in HTTP/2. They also refactored existing code and added functionalities like the ability to handle a different number of header blocks. Furthermore, they were responsible for addressing and fixing various bugs related to the codebase's functionality.
luacqueuesnetworkhttp2
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