Neil Balch
Culver City, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNeil Balch is an ambitious control-systems and robotics-focused software engineer with a decade of hands-on experience and a strong academic foundation from UC Santa Barbara. Based in Culver City, he blends avionics experience at SpaceX with a maker’s curiosity for (aero)space systems, building robust simulations and tooling. His open-source contributions to the well-known OpenRocket project include Java upgrades, QA-driven testing, UTF-8 data fixes, and RockSim import repairs—demonstrating care for interoperability and data integrity. Comfortable across backend development, QA, and embedded/avionics domains, he excels at taking complex models from concept to reliable software. Neil’s work suggests a pragmatic engineer who pairs rigorous testing discipline with an eye for real-world aerospace workflows.
10 years of coding experience
3.9/4 GPA, 3.9/4 GPA at UC Santa Barbara
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
6,526reputation
562kreached
62answers
27questions
windows-subsystem-for-linux
top-5%
visual-studio-code
top-1%
Github Skills (18)
visual-studio-code10
testing10
java10
javas10
simulation9
simulations9
windows9
windows-subsystem-for-linux9
aerospace8
ubuntu6
vim6
linux6
bash6
github6
python6
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
openrocket/openrocket
Oct 2019 - May 2021
Model-rocketry aerodynamics and trajectory simulation software
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & QA Engineer
Backend Developer & QA EngineerContributions:1 review, 9 commits, 2 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Neil primarily worked on improving the codebase, including upgrading to Java 11 and addressing potential warnings. A significant portion of the commits involved detailed testing, as demonstrated by the modifications to the `FlightConfigurationTest.java` file, ensuring code quality and functionality. Furthermore, the user corrected UTF-8 encoding for CSV export, showcasing an understanding of data handling and file operations within the context of the project's simulation features. The user also contributed to fixing RockSim import functionalities.
pythonopenrocketsimulationdiscrete-event-simulationsimulator
neilbalch/nginx-rtmp
May 2017 - Mar 2018
Contributions:12 commits, 11 pushes, 1 branch in 10 months
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