Hi! My name is Joshua Ballanco. I am a software engineer living in and working remotely from Greenville, SC. I've spoken at a number of different software development conferences around the world and have even been known to blog from time to time. I have a background in Computational Evolutionary Biology and I enjoy contributing to a number of different Open Source projects.
Hi! My name is Joshua Ballanco. I am a software engineer living in and working remotely from Greenville, SC. I've spoken at a number of different software development conferences around the world and have even been known to blog from time to time. I have a background in Computational Evolutionary Biology and I enjoy contributing to a number of different Open Source projects.
These are just a couple of my favorite libraries and random side-projects...
This is a little library for Objective-C that I hacked on with a few friends. It provides extensions with helper methods for performing thread-safe concurrent map, filter, and other operations on the common Cocoa collection classes using Grand Central Dispatch under the hood.
I went ahead and implemented the Y-Combinator using blocks in Objective-C. Why? As the great George Mallory once put it: "Because it's there!"
I was learning Clojure with a group of co-workers, and this was one of the "homework" projects that we assigned ourselves. I also used it as a playground, of sorts, to experiment with Clojure's reducers when they were introduced
A different take on an old classic. This is an implementation of the traditional
"FizzBuzz" problem using Clojure's core.logic
library. It started as a
just-for-fun project, but I ended up learning quite a lot about
core.logic
along the way.
You can find more of my code on GitHub.
This is the paper I prepared as part of my Ph.D. preliminary examination. The topic is "The Importance of Side-Chain Entropy in Protein Folding"... I know, riveting stuff, right? If you're the sort of person that likes this kind of stuff, you can also get the LaTeX source for the paper here. I've released it all under a CC BY-NC license.
This is the full text of my Ph.D. Thesis Dissertation entitled "A Model for the Evolution of Nucleotide Polymerase Directionality". If you don't feel like slogging through a full thesis, you can also check out the slightly shorter version that I published as a paper in PLoS One. The LaTeX source is also available here and is also licensed under a CC BY-NC license.
This is the "toy model" (that's a technical term) that I constructed and studied as the bulk of my Ph.D. Thesis work. It was originally written in Ruby (and the "master" branch represents the final version used for all of the work presented in my dissertation), but I've also begun experimenting with re-implementing it in other languages.