About Me

I'm an embedded software engineer at a large semiconductor company in San Diego. I recently got my M.S. in computer science from UCSD. Most of my work and my writing focuses on compilers and programming languages. I'm also interested in high performance computing, real-time 3D graphics, and game development.

View my résumé

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Blog entries

• Water simulation in GLSL
• Trapping floating point exceptions in Linux
• Convenient updates for immutable objects in Scala
• Parallelization: Harder than it looks
• Tutorial: Reverse debugging with GDB 7
• Processing large files in Scala
• Midrange computers are amazingly cheap
• Scala's IDE support is terrible
• Tutorial: Function Interposition in Linux
• Demise of the BBS
• Keeping a developer diary
• How to use HTTP cookies in Python
• Currying and why we don't pass arguments as tuples
• Method resolution
• New Blogging System with Python/MySQL
• Fixpoint type inference
• Type tagging format
• Limitations on generics
• Type inference
• Type inference and generics post-mortem

Résumé of Jay Conrod

Work History

Research Assistant at UCSD
April 2009 to March 2010
Developed compiler transformations and runtime libraries to reduce memory consumption of network programs so limited versions could be run on low power devices.

Summer Intern at NVIDIA Corporation
Summers of 2007, 2008
Worked on the Resource Manager kernel driver, developed a compiler performance test framework, worked on validation and optimization for a compiler targeting next-generation GPUs.

Teaching Assistant at Caltech Computer Science Department
Spring 2007 to spring 2008
Gave recitations, office hours, and graded for undergraduate courses in 3D graphics, C, and OCaml.

Student Researcher at Caltech (SURF Program)
Summers of 2005, 2006
Designed and developed a cross-platform application for visualizing cosmic ray showers in C++ and Qt. The application could search and download collected data via HTTP, submit data for reconstruction, and visualize reconstructions using OpenGL.

Summer Intern at High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility (Northrop Grumman)
Summer 2004
Data collection and entry.

Co-owner of Epion Mobile DJs
Spring 2003 to spring 2004
Played music for weddings, proms, and other parties.

Education

University of California, San Diego
M.S. in Computer Science
2008 to 2010
GPA 3.8

California Institute of Technology
B.S. in Computer Science
2004 to 2008
Overall GPA 3.4; In-major 3.8

New Mexico State University
2002 to 2004
GPA 4.0

Alamogordo High School
Valedictorian
2000 to 2004
GPA 4.333

Experience and Skills

Compiler Development and Language Design
At UCSD, I worked on program instrumentation and compiler transformations using LLVM as part of a research project to reduce the resource requirements of programs in embedded environments. During my senior year at Caltech, I designed a new programming language and wrote an open source x86 compiler for it in Java. I have also worked on a compiler for next-generation GPUs at NVIDIA as a summer intern.

Kernel Driver Development
I worked on several modifications to the Linux kernel as part of coursework at Caltech including a custom scheduler and a distributed shared memory system. As a summer intern at NVIDIA, I fixed bugs in the kernel driver and developed user-space instrumentation for a thermal control chip.

Programming Languages: C, C++, Objective-C, Java, Scala, Python, Bash, OCaml, Haskell