James Davis
Assistant Professor at Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Davis is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University with a decade of experience spanning academia, industrial research, and production software engineering. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, where his dissertation focused on defeating Regular Expression Denial of Service, and he has applied that expertise in security-focused open-source contributions. His practical background includes systems and storage testing at IBM, web security research at Microsoft Research, and test automation work on prominent projects like libuv and marked (mitigating REDOS and improving test reliability). James blends low-level C/C++ systems work, compiler and runtime compatibility fixes, and security-minded regex refactoring, demonstrating a rare mix of rigorous research and hands-on engineering. Based in West Lafayette, he is known for turning subtle correctness and performance issues into robust, testable solutions that benefit both research and widely used open-source software.
10 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Virginia TechKingston High SchoolBachelor’s Degree, Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Mathematics and Computer Science at Clarkson University
English
Stackoverflow
898reputation
1.7mreached
23answers
2questions
regex
top-5%
Github Skills (28)
javascript10
c-language10
webworker10
multithreading10
testing10
c1110
security10
c1710
regular-expression10
nodejs10
cprogramming-language10
concurrency10
async9
asynchronous9
parserator9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
libuv/libuv
Mar 2017 - Mar 2019
Cross-platform asynchronous I/O
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:11 PRs, 187 comments, 3 issues in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the testing infrastructure of the libuv project. They implemented new test cases, focusing on the `condvar` functionality, ensuring the `uv_cond_timedwait` function correctly handles timeouts and signals. These changes included the introduction of semaphores for test ordering and the correction of existing test logic to improve reliability. Furthermore, the user addressed compiler warnings related to unused results in the testing code and increased the upper bound for a timeout check in one of the tests.
unixunicornsasynchronouswindowsio
markedjs/marked
Feb 2018 - Jun 2018
A markdown parser and compiler. Built for speed.
Role in this project:Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:5 reviews, 11 commits, 8 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on improving the security of the `markedjs/marked` repository. Their contributions involved refactoring regular expressions to address vulnerabilities like catastrophic backtracking and REDOS attacks, enhancing the code's resilience against potential exploits. The user also implemented tests to detect performance issues.
speedcommonmarkmarkdown-parsercompilergfm
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