James Watson Homer
Computer Science Student & Software Engineer
Aiming for honours and a PhD in AI. Formerly Senior Modelling and Control Engineer with the USYD Rocketry Team.
Experience & Education
University of Sydney
Bachelor of Advanced Computing (Computer Science)
Studying as a Dalyell Scholar, graduating June 2028. I'm interested in all aspects of my learning, planning on completing honours and a PhD in AI.
USYD Rocketry Team
Senior Modelling and Control Engineer · Aug 2025 – Aug 2026
Led the integration of airbrakes into Ironbark, the team's trajectory simulator, and mentored two junior members. Ironbark's oxidizer fill estimation and control algorithm fitting helped the team win category first place at IREC 2026.
Ground Control Software Engineer · Sep 2024 – Aug 2025
Created CLI data management tools with FTP to safely handle telemetry data, designed laser-cut panels, and aided in the design of the launch controller. The team won first place at IREC 2025 in Midland, Texas, against 142 university teams from 22 countries.
The International High School of the Gothenburg Region
International Baccalaureate Diploma
Focused on STEM subjects while maintaining broad interests in the humanities, particularly History.
Self-Directed Learning & Freelance Work
Programming & Client Projects
Learnt Java through Minecraft plugin development, expanded skills to C++, JavaScript, and Python while taking on Minecraft plugin freelance projects and developing client management skills.
Born in Sydney, Australia 🇦🇺
Technical Skills
Projects
Jarv
Jarv is a scriptable, interactive AI agent TUI in Python that talks to several model providers directly over httpx.
- Agent tools let it browse the web, edit codebases, and change computer settings, with automatic cost tracking built in.
- Discovers models and pricing live from each provider's /models endpoint, so listings stay current without updating Jarv.
- An automatic auditor reviews risky commands, reducing the effectiveness of prompt injection attacks and unwanted behaviour.
Ironbark
Ironbark is the USYD Rocketry Team's 6-DOF trajectory solver. I'm its lead developer and maintainer.
- Implemented airbrake simulation and a modular framework for control algorithms, built for the team's first actively controlled rocket.
- Migrated the aerodynamics from panel solver techniques to Gaussian Processes (scikit-learn) fitted on CFD-derived data.
- That migration significantly improved sample efficiency, simulation accuracy, and interpolation simplicity.
Interests
AI & LLMs
Hands-on experience with the OpenAI (Usage Tier 4), Gemini, and Claude APIs. Fine-tuned large language models and built mapbench, a benchmark experiment evaluating spatial reasoning in language models. Actively learning PyTorch and reading papers on the way to honours and a PhD in AI.
Rocketry
Two years of competition rocketry with the USYD ROcketry Team, first in gorund control software then modelling and control. Most interested in simulating reality as well as building the pipelines and software to enable such things efficiently and in an automated fashion.
LLM Applications
Built Slides2Textbook, an open-source CLI tool that uses LLMs to convert lecture slides and transcripts into coherent, well-formatted textbook chapters. I'm interested in the very many current and future practical applications of language models.