About Me
You found me! I'm glad you're here.
I am a 30 something who has been messing with Linux and various programming languages since I was 10 something. I grew up with a 386SX running MS-DOS 6.22, which I used to cut my teeth on programming by first writing batch files and later screen mode games in QBasic. Soon thereafter, Windows 95 became popular and I spent some time writing Visual Basic 4.0 junk before having the misfortune of introducing myself to C++ via MSVC++ 5.0. In an attempt to overcome the trauma induced by MFC, there was a short period where I wrote Windows applications in assembly using what is now known as Steve Hutchesson's (i.e. hutch's) MASM32 SDK. I highly recommend everybody do this. Around this same time I began running Linux in dual-boot configuration, which quickly resulted in the ditching of Windows altogether around 1998.
I have been using various Linux distributions for my primary operating system since kernel 2.0.36. In 2001, I went to college to study electrical engineering (mostly electronics and control systems). During this time I ran Gentoo except for a year in there where I ran FreeBSD (and another 9 months or so where I ran Linux From Scratch). In 2006 I began working on a master's degree in electrical engineering, which mostly involved studying solid state electrophysics, where I published a paper on enhancing photodetectors using plasmonics lens. Around this time I had moved on to running Ubuntu, which is what I run now. In 2011 I completed my Ph.D in Computer Engineering, which focused on the development of parallel volumetric image processing algorithms for execution of GPUs. During this time I wrote tons of CUDA code, which is now part of the Plastimatch software package. In addition to academic publications, work from the Ph.D has been published as Chapter 47 in GPU Computing Gems: Emerald Edition as well as a delightfully plain covered book. Subsequently, I spent about a year working as a postdoc at MGH/Harvard Medical. I am now a tenure track assistant professor in the ECE Department at Drexel University, where I recently received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.
This blog is where I write for fun.
Contact
I am always interested in meeting and having discussions with interesting people. In addition to the Disqus comments, you can reach out to me via:
- Twitter: @ProfShack
- LinkedIn: jashack
My PGP Fingerprint is:
1 | 7F9F D4E8 141E F12C 190E A988 FEBE 2144 D587 0ED3 |