Blake Charlton Portfolio

About Me

Hello, I'm Blake! I am a Software Engineer currently working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I build internal tools used by engineers operating the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, including Python scripts, Jupyter notebooks, and Flask APIs.

A family friend got me interested in software engineering at a young age. He worked on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. More than a decade later, I was fortunate enough to work with him on NASA's InSight mission!

Experience

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Software Engineer, APR Consulting Inc.

April 2022 - Present

AWS CSS Docker Elasticsearch Flask HTML Jenkins Linux Multithreaded Programming Python Unix Shell

Served as the Subject Matter Expert for various ground software tools used by Engineering and Science Operation team members.
Worked with Engineering Operations stakeholders to design and enhance tools used in day-to-day operations of the Perseverance rover, including Dockerized Flask APIs deployed in an EC2 instance and Python scripts running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 machines.
Lead effort to update tools to support Mars 2020 transition to Simple Planner mode, an artificially intelligent flight software paradigm that allows the Perseverance rover to operate with some autonomy.
Automated and enhanced Sequence Integration Engineer (SIE) processes, resulting in a 25% reduction in the SIE timeline, or 3 engineering hours daily.
Created an XML comparison tool that enabled 2.5 engineering hours to be saved daily.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Software Engineer, Columbus Technologies and Services Inc

March 2021 - April 2022

CSS HTML Java JavaScript Linux Python SQL Unix Shell

Served as the Subject Matter Expert for ground software tools used by Sequence Integration Engineers (SIEs), Science Plan Integrators (SPIs), and Tactical Uplink Leads (TULs) on the InSight Mission.
Utilized Python, Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and proprietary NASA language, APGEN, to update and fix ground software tools used in the InSight SIE, SPI, and TUL processes.
Completed significant enhancements, saving operators time and increasing operational safety. Solved multiple problems that had been plaguing the operations team for years.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Software Engineer, Intern

June 2019 - August 2019

Confluence CSS HTML JavaScript Jira Python TestRail

Worked with the Mission Planning, Sequencing, and Analysis (MPSA) testing team to automate various test processes, including documentation generation, image comparison, and updating statuses of test results.
Created methodology of centralizing all data used in the documents needed by the MPSA team.
Used Python scripts and Confluence, Jira, and TestRail APIs to scrape JSON data needed in the automatically generated documents.
Implemented an image comparison tool for existing Robot Framework automated tests.
Parsed XML documents containing test results and automatically uploaded the statuses to TestRail.

Contact

Feel free to reach out to me!
My email is blake.r.charlton@gmail.com, or you can connect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/blake-r-charlton/.