James Derrick

Background

About James Derrick

I work on Developer Enablement at Ansys, regularly organising academic "Code Fests" around the world that highlight the benefits of our developer tools for example) I have also presented at PyCon US 2024 https://youtu.be/BJ2Ve4opPIk?si=ehNMkb-1S5EA40rG. I am also an admin and curator of the Ansys Developer Forum https://discuss.ansys.com/ where we are building a vibrant community of developers as well as a key content creator for the Ansys Developer Portal, where you can read much of my work, e.g. https://developer.ansys.com/blog/advent-code-2023-survivors-and-results. In addition to this, I have also organised Ansys' internal Hackathon 3 years running now as well as their sponsorship of the Advent of Code 2023. My expertise lies in Python, but I am interested to learn other languages and am currently exploring Rust. I am the instructor of the Ansys "Introduction to Python" course (https://courses.ansys.com/index.php/courses/intro-to-python/). Before this I worked at Ansys as a Software Engineer in the DevOps team, doing similar enablement work (articles, teaching, outreach, etc.) before taking on my current role. And before that I worked at Granta Design as an Application Developer where I developed Python and assisted customers with bespoke programs as part of the Application Engineering team, including releasing a 1.0 software tool as the primary developer. I did a PhD at Imperial College London researching the shock compaction of granular materials at the mesoscale. This is an intermediate scale, resolving individual grains (microscale), in sufficient numbers to to also consider the bulk response (macroscale). I principally used, and developed, the shock physics code, iSALE (FORTRAN90), to model situations where collections of grains are 'shocked'(subjected to a discontinuous stress-wave) in 2D; I processed this data using python scripts. I graduated from Imperial with a First Class integrated Masters degree (MSci) in straight Physics. My Masters project was in the Imperial Plasma Dept. and was in Laboratory Astrophysics,"Supersonic Plasma Jets, Introducing Angular Momentum into Jet Experiments, through the use of Permanent Magnets"​. I also like to hike and run in my free time, as well as play trombone and I am the treasurer of CMFG