About

My name is James Weiland, and I am a software engineer. Many things interest me; I currently love my work at Arch, where I am structuring financial data from unstructured sources. Outside of work, I enjoy listening to music, running, and watching UIUC basketball.

What I’ve Been Working On

I recently got a Raspberry Pi 4B that I’m using to host a handful of services, including pihole and a tor relay. See what I’m running!

My Background

I’ve liked math & physics since I was young, but I never knew what direction I wanted to go. My senior year of high school, I was fortunate enough to have a great AP Physics teacher who had a PhD in Mechanical Engineering. I liked him, so I decided to follow his footsteps.

Me with Dr. Nunes
Me and Dr. Nunes, dressed up for twin day during senior spirit week. This photo is still up on his wall!

I never coded before college, other than dragging blocks around in Scratch. My freshman semester, I took CS101 (an intro to Python course for MechE students), and I hated it! For a while, this course reinforced my belief that I just wasn’t a programmer.

I got my first real taste of the cool things computers could do when I decided to copy a Fireship video to run an uncensored variety of Mixtral on my laptop. I had very little understanding of how LLMs worked back then, and I barely knew what a GPU was; it would take about 5 minutes to generate a single token.

I remember feeling like a real hacker using WSL!

At my internship the following summer, I found myself naturally writing Python scripts to automate tasks, scrape websites, build predictive models, etc. This was my moment of realization that I wanted to build software. I spent my free time that summer teaching myself Java, so I would have a head start on a CS minor the following semester. Eventually, the majority of my free time was spent working on random projects. This compounded into getting a job as a software engineer after graduation.