résumé

Tom Jakubowski

I believe software developers work best when empowered with great tools. When the right tool for the job doesn’t already exist, I am eager to make one. I am an experienced engineer and a lifelong tinkerer, always looking for ways to make work fun.

some of my skills

work experience

Senior Software Engineer, The Prospective Company (2023–)

Prospective Co. is a startup building a new kind of data dashboard product, with all data fetched and streamed into its visualization engine entirely within the user’s web browser; our servers never see any of your data.

My primary contributions have been to integrate Jupyter Notebook with the product, which provides a Python data science environment (using pyodide) for cleaning data in the browser before it is visualized.

Senior Software Engineer, Second Spectrum (2019–2023)

Second Spectrum teaches computers how to watch sports. On the AI team, I developed a Rust FFI wrapper around C++ computer vision algorithms for use in both Second Spectrum’s next-generation low-latency tracking system and in a realtime TV broadcast augmentation engine, featured on live broadcasts by CBS and ESPN. I later learned Elixir to work on a Phoenix web application used to produce live player and ball tracking feeds for customers like the NBA, English Premier League, and Major League Soccer.

Software Engineer, Oblong Industries (2015–2019)

On the Client Solutions team, I developed room-scale interactive applications with data visualizations for the display wall and immersion room systems at IBM’s Watson Executive Briefing Centers, using C++, OpenGL, and g-speak, Oblong’s platform for spatial computing. I maintained libWebThing, a library which rendered web content in our applications using Chromium Embedded Framework.

I created Node.JS bindings for libPlasma, g-speak’s realtime message passing framework, supporting both internal and customer usage. I developed Node.JS web applications for our customer which used those libPlasma bindings to configure, control, and debug our installed applications.

I also drove the team’s adoption of Rust for developer tools and offline data processing pipelines, many of which used Rust bindings to libPlasma which I wrote for fun in my spare time.

Sizzle reel, courtesy of my colleague John Carpenter

Software Engineer, FanMob (2013–2015)

I was the sole engineer in a sports-oriented polling and advertising startup of two people. I developed the user-facing web application and customer-facing embedding API, used by high-traffic sites like Bleacher Report.

Web Developer, TuneWiki (2011–2013)

I led the rewrite of TuneWiki’s song lyrics website from Wordpress to Laravel framework. I was also the primary developer of TuneWiki’s #1-ranked Spotify App, which rendered a song’s lyrics in sync with playback.

open source

libPlasma (repo)

In an effort by several Oblong engineers past and present to open-source libPlasma, I lended a hand by cleaning up some documentation and giving build advice.

Rust programming language (contributions from 2014–2020)

I’ve contributed many improvements and bug fixes to the Rust programming language project; largely on rustdoc, Rust’s API documentation generator.

The two most significant features I implemented in rustdoc were support for associated types and trait bounds in where clauses.

Weasel REPL (repo)

I created a modernized version of ClojureScript’s browser REPL, which used WebSockets as the foundation of a stabler REPL-driven development experience. Weasel’s architecture also for the first time enabled ClojureScript developers working in exotic JavaScript runtimes (like JavaScriptCore and QtQuick) to connect to a REPL.

education

B.S., Chemistry, University of California, Irvine (2010)