About Me

I am a software engineer who lives in the Pacific Northwest. This is my personal blog site where I write about random technical topics that interest me.

I have a doctorate (Ed.D. / Ph.D.) in cognitive psychology and computational statistics from the University of Southern California, an MS in computer science from Hawaii Pacific University, a BA in applied mathematics from California State University at Fullerton, and a BA in experimental psychology from the University of California at Irvine.

I am particularly fascinated by mathematical combinatorics, the analysis of gambling systems, machine learning, and algorithms based on the behavior of natural systems.

I rarely express any opinions here, but when I do, they’re my personal opinions and not those of any company I work for.

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Note about this blog site name: The original name of this blog site in 2006 was jamesmccaffrey.wordpress.com because I used wordpress.com (a free domain associated with the WordPress software). In 2025 I decided to install a free WordPress plugin to automatically backup the site. This instantly broke the URL I’d been using for 18+ years and renamed the site to jamesmccaffrey.wpstaging.com and also made the site invisible to Google indexing. Grrr. So, eventually, I decided to purchase a dedicated domain — jamesmccaffreyblog.com — to avoid the staging taint and the invisibility.

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