Jacob Barber | Senior Software Engineer | 469-713-4764 | JacobA.Barber@yahoo.com

Objective

I aim to expand and apply my knowledge to new domains, like systems infrastructure management, AI model development, and agentic workflow implementations while improving my Haskell chops.

Skills

  • Scala (SBT, Doobie, Akka, Scalaz, Cats)
  • Python
  • C#
  • PostgreSQL/MySQL
  • Functional Programming
  • Haskell
  • AWS
  • Data Schema Management
  • Reverse Engineering
  • Full Stack Development
  • AWS Infrastructure Management
  • CloudFormation
  • Terraform

#Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer for Disney

January 2018 – Present
  • Created tools to identify outages and affected systems and perform RCA to reduce losses, increase uptime, and ultimately improve the user experience at the frontend
  • Built tools to generate dependency graphs, which significantly reduce the time needed to propagate releases through multiple complex systems
  • Helped design tools used throughout the organization to collaboratively develop, maintain collaboratively, and distribute data schemas in a cross-platform manner, leading to faster time to market
  • Significantly reduced the communication overhead of team collaboration within complex cross-organization efforts
  • Developed the API and programming architecture underpinning Disney's event streaming framework
  • Worked directly with product managers to improve the Ad serving capabilities of the streaming platform
  • Developed services allowing product managers to inspect application decisions and to show what users would have seen during a viewing session, as well as the interactions with other HTTP services, which ultimately led to the given decision
  • Significantly improved performance through benchmarking and JVM tuning, reducing costs for our running services

Senior Software Engineer for StackPath

July 2016 – December 2017
  • Developed a website speed and vulnerability scanning tool using Twitter's Finagle, integrating with several other cloud-based web services and Redis. This tool markets our speed and security-focused CDN
  • Mentored new and existing Scala developers on best practices within the language, as well as how to do functional programming using category theory from Cats/Scalaz
  • Helped explore new technologies to add to our toolchain or to replace existing tools
  • Developed the underlying libraries that are now used to fuel all web APIs within the StackPath systems
  • Created an XML RPC module for running a website speed profiling tool from an RPC node
  • Created documentation on how to use various functional type-classes like Functor, Monad, Monoid, and Bitraverse with a focus on applicability rather than theory

Software Engineer and Lead Engineer for Bottle Rocket Studios

June 2015 – July 2016
  • Used Scala to Develop and eventually lead a complex greenfield product that provides an online ordering and loyalty program for a national restaurant chain hosted in AWS
  • Leveraged Amazon SQS to provide a scalable solution for managing loyalty transactions and operations
  • Created independent services to manage ETL processes, which would provide data to REST APIs for consumption by client devices
  • Eliminated unnecessary Akka actor layers in favor of a simpler, more type-safe solution
  • Introduced teams to Scalaz and Cats and mentored team members on how to make use of their abstractions
  • Mentored other engineers on Scala best practices and functional programming best practices
  • Led discussions with other sister teams to move the group forward with new technologies and ideas

Software Engineer for Cytracom, LLC

August 2013 – June 2015
  • Developed atomic UNIX services and applications in Scala
  • Created software that would perform automatic provisioning of hardware shipped out to customers
  • Created an application that would parse Asterisk's flat Call-Detail-Record (CDR) data format into a more conventional dataset that is well-represented by JSON and easy to consume
  • Set up a nightly FTP process for customers who have requested the ability to store their recordings locally
  • Designed, developed, and deployed (eventually via CIS) the company's core PHP REST API
  • Created API integrations to handle the creation and modification of VoIP call paths in asterisk
  • Integrated billing systems with our platform so that it handles all billing transactions and accounting reports
  • Worked directly with the business owners and founders to develop a product that would enhance the experience of the end user whilst simplifying internal company procedures via applications and services

Web-Designer for The Deyogroup, Inc.

March 2012 – August 2013
  • Maintained and developed reactive and interactive websites via HTML, CSS, and Javascript
  • Developed applications to aid in data migration using Java
  • Developed HTML parsers that use Javascript to convert HTML from one format to another
  • Wrote an ETL pipeline to convert an external business' data format to the product's data format using Java

#Open Source Projects

Polehammer Poster

  • Created an AI leveraging the polehammer.net weapons data
  • Helped users on Reddit with questions about weapon comparisons
  • Inferred when a misunderstanding was happening or when an interjection would be helpful
  • Beloved by many in the Chivalry 2 community
  • See /u/polehammerposter on Reddit

Chivalry 2 Unchained

  • Created a 0-cost package management system
  • Created a replacement backend for a live service, projected to stop working in the next couple of years
  • Created a WPF app for users to manage game modifications without interfering with their ability to play unmodified on official servers
  • Reverse-engineered several backend web service calls and rerouted them to our backend so that modified servers do not interact with the live service or impact the UX of other players playing an unmodified version
  • Created a distributed ban system to help deal with a significant cheating problem

Polehammer.net

  • Provides multiple visualizations of weapon stats from the game Chivalry 2
  • Allows quick and easy objective comparison of key characteristics of the various weapons
  • Created an ingest tool that interprets the game data and generates a changelog to indicate weapon balance differences
  • Provided npm packages containing just the weapon data for other developers to create their own projects

VimPort Sort

  • Created a vim import sorting plugin
  • User configurable and well-documented
  • Usable with any language that uses top-of-file imports
  • Subdivides imports into user-configurable import groups

Lan Mouse

  • Added Macos multi-monitor support to a Rust code base
  • Better multi-monitor experience than the current industry-standard alternative to lan-mouse, Synergy

#Favorite Programming Languages and their features

The best features of some of the most usable languages
Programming Language Static Typing Higher Kinded Types Typeclasses/Adhoc polymorphism
Scala Yes Yes Yes
Haskell Yes Yes Yes
Rust Yes No Yes