BinaryDen

Introduction

Personal

A photograph of Erica Kovac.

Erica Kovac is a software engineer who is a strong proponent of open source software, reason, and social technocracy. In her free time, Erica likes to play tabletop roleplaying games and video games, read books on psychology, sociology, economics, policy, and anything else non-fiction that strikes her fancy, with some light interest in fantasy and sci-fi novels. She currently shares a home in Arlington, MA with her partner, Torne, and her cat, Wesley.

Professional

During the majority of her undergraduate career, Erica worked as a laboratory technician under Professor Holly Yanco of the UMass Lowell Robotics Lab, primarily working on backend software managing communications between a robot and its teleoperations interface, as well as updating legacy code to function cleanly on modern Linux systems. She also was briefly involved in the design of a modular, dependency-based mail processing system for the Bettrbox project of Good Ventures LLC, going on to graduate with her BS in Computer Science from UMass Lowell in Spring of 2011.

Erica Kovac studied computer science as a PhD student at UMass Lowell under Professor Georges Grinstein and the Institute for Visualization & Perception Research. She did not complete her degree, instead joining the start-up spun off of IVPR, Weave Visual Analytics, as one of the cofounding engineers, contributing significantly to the development of a Javascript-based successor to the Weave data visualization platform. Like many startups, WVA did not find success.

Erica Kovac is currently employed by Google LLC, aiding in frontend development for Google Cloud Monitoring.

Projects

Personal Projects

All software linked here, unless otherwise noted, is licensed under GPLv3.

x86term
A terminal emulator for bare x86 PCs.
evedustrial
A REPL-friendly library for accessing and integrated the Eve: Online character and EveCentral Market APIs for performing cost-benefit analysis.

Open Source Contributions

WeaveJS
An HTML5/JS-based data visualization platform.
Weave
A Flash-based data visualization platform.

Hacks and Tidbits

term-pwd
A tool for determining the current working directory of a shell running insde an xterm or other terminal emulator on X.
pgm2escp9
A tool to create an ESC/P custom character stream from a monochrome image to enable graphical printing on some printers which fail to do so using the CUPS ESC/P driver. Example output.

Disclaimer: The software above is provided with no warranty, implied or otherwise. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

Contact Info

If you would like a copy of my resume or are interested in mailing me a physical document, e-mail me at the address provided above for the needed information.