Jonathan Castello

Software Engineer

About Me

Hi! I’m a first-year1 graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, advised by Dr. Lindsey Kuper. I’m interested in all things concurrency, but especially those things which are not also parallelism. Concurrency is all about the local knowledge each part of a system has about the whole system, and how those parts interact – and that’s also a pretty good summary of software architecture! If you’d like to get in touch, you can find me at any of the social sites under my name in the header above, but I spend most of my time on Twitter and Hacker News.

Previously, I worked for ~8 years as a software engineer at JPL, where I worked on mission planning and simulation software used by multiple spacecraft. We’ve since open-sourced the project, Aerie, and it remains under active development! I also had the extreme privilege of working on the Cassini mission to Saturn before it completed in 2017.

I’ve been doing some flavor of software engineering for about twenty years! In that time, I’ve cultivated a passion for sustainable software engineering, spanning broad interests in statically typed languages, concurrency-driven modularity, and balancing correctness, legibility, and speed. I’m less concerned with particular technology stacks, and far more interested in deeply understanding the problem domain to be automated. Looking forward, I’m sure plenty of my published content here will be on these topics.

Please don’t hesistate to reach out on Twitter if you’d like to chat! (If you prefer e-mail, my address is my Twitter username at this domain.)

  1. As of 2022. At the rate I update this page, I might have graduated by the time you read this. Alas.