Jim Fawcett, Ph.D.

Emeritus Teaching Professor, Software Developer, & Wed Designer

Formerly System Engineer, Software Engineer, Manager for General Electric Co., Syracuse NY

" 'I think I should understand that better', Alice said very politely, 'if I had it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it.' "
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in wonderland

Great Path

Front row:

Naman Parakh,

Yilin Cui,

Harika Bandaru,

Sonal Patil,

Mike Corley

Back row:

Nilesh Dwivedi,

Naga Krishna,

Akash Bhosale,

Vaibhav Kumar,

Ammar Salman,

Ritesh Nair

I've had the good fortune, in twenty eight years teaching graduate courses at Syracuse University, to have great support from paid and voluteer Teaching Assistants. They were smart, hard-working, and patient with students.

We often worked with about 200 students each semester, and the support I received was an essential part of our courses.

In gratitude, I've taken my TAs to lunch each semester. This photo is our last lunch at the SU Faculty Center before my retirement.

It has been a pleasure for me to work with so many graduate students over the years. I've enjoyed almost every minute of the time I spent with them in the classroom and advising in my office and casual conversations in hallways.

Syracuse University Website

I taught five graduate courses based on my Syracuse University website. All the course contents: syllabus, lecture content, and assignments are accessible by clicking the "Courses" top menu item. This includes content for:

Here's a video of a Friday morning help session, just before a "CSE681 - Software Modeling & Analysis" project was due. The video is long, but five minutes of view time will give you a feeling for course content. The first four minutes are about scoring for the project, so you might want to skip that. I put the link here as a memento of one of my favorite times at Syracuse University.

My research activities and work with doctoral advises is documented in SU website/Research, and not repeated in this site. I am pleased to have been the reseach advisor for five successful Ph.D. candidates and many master's theses.

This github Website

This experience is a prime motivation for construction of this website. I taught each of my courses primarily from materials in my SU Website. Some former students have contacted me saying that they still referred to the site for refreshers and pieces of code while working professionally.

So, I decided after retirement, to build this site to store and describe a curated selection of code and presentation pages originally developed for courses: Object Oriented Design, Software Modeling and Analysis, Design Patterns, Internet Programming, and Distributed Objects. Also to add new bits of code for other things that interest me.

Hosting on github makes code easily accessible, relatively easy to maintain, and I now have the opportunity to install only code that is currently relevant. My SU site had accumulated code over almost all of 28 years of teaching, so there was a lot of no longer relevant code there. Unfortunately my poor house-keeping skills applied to the SU site as well as my home.

The site provides a way to provide a more ordered and focused storage and try out some ideas for deployment.

Now What?

I wrote my first C++ program in 1988 and lot's of C and Fortran before that, and I am still enthusiastic about developing software. But retirement is more than coding. Now there's time for other things including friends and family and some travel - Cape Cod this summer.

So development of this site will go in sprints between other things. I expect, though, that the site will be fairly useful by the end of 2019. I hope you find it worth your time. It would be great to hear from anyone using the site, especially former students. You can do that by sending a message to "jimfawcett.fawcett at gmail.com"