James Swaine
Senior Software Engineer at Driver
Greater Chicago Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Swaine is a Senior Software Engineer with 16 years of experience specializing in programming languages, runtime systems, compilers, parallel computing, and performance profiling. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern University, where he added lightweight parallelism (futures) to the Racket VM and JIT and developed visualization tooling used by the community. At DRW and now Driver he applies deep systems and static-analysis expertise to production back-end problems, while contributing bug fixes and concurrency features to the prominent Racket open-source repository. James blends research-grade rigor with pragmatic engineering—comfortable modifying garbage collectors, semaphore implementations, and primitive-call validation—and enjoys turning profiling insights into practical visual tools. Based in the Greater Chicago area, he brings a rare combination of formal methods training and hands-on systems work that helps surface and solve subtle concurrency and performance issues.
16 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science at Northwestern UniversityB.A International Studies, B.A International Studies at Rhodes College
Spanish, Russian
Github Skills (9)
racket10
memory-management10
futures10
concurrency10
garbage-collection9
semaphore9
sem9
debug8
debugging8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
racket/racket
Nov 2009 - May 2013
The Racket repository
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:99 commits, 1 comment in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:James's commits primarily focus on fixing bugs and adding features related to futures and concurrency within the Racket project. They made changes to the `future.c` file, introducing and fixing issues related to the interactions of threads, memory management, and primitive calls. Their work includes changes to the garbage collector, semaphore implementation, and improvements to the visualizer for futures. They also added argument validation for primitive calls within the future system and improved the documentation.
code-golfschemepolyglotlanguage-designprogramming-languages
Zoetermeer/Zoetermeer.github.io
Oct 2018 - Oct 2022
Contributions:40 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years
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