Jacob Bower
Sr. Software Engineer at General Dynamics C4 Systems
Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJacob Bower is a senior software engineer with 10+ years building hardware/software integration for Software Defined Radio and embedded PowerPC systems, currently driving solutions at General Dynamics C4 Systems from Fort Wayne. He combines low-level C/C++ systems expertise with hands-on assembly and hardware debugging, and brings a rare cross-domain fluency between RF hardware and production software. An active open-source contributor, Jacob has improved core infrastructure in projects like Watchman and CPython variants (including performance work in Meta’s Cinder and tooling in Hermes), demonstrating impact on stability and compile/runtime performance. His background in computer engineering (BS/MS) underpins a pragmatic approach to removing production crashes and squeezing measurable speedups from compilers and runtimes. Notably, he’s moved client libraries between large projects and fixed subtle concurrency and socket-death bugs—work that quietly improves developer tooling and system resilience.
10 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Engineering, BS, Computer Engineering at Michigan Technological UniversityMS, Computer Engineering, MS, Computer Engineering at Iowa State University
Github Skills (41)
asynchronous10
debug10
javascript10
c-language10
runtimes10
python10
multithreading10
async10
build-system10
generator10
capi10
internals10
interpreter10
networking10
compiler-compiler10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
facebookincubator/cinder
Apr 2021 - Jan 2023
Cinder is Meta's internal performance-oriented production version of CPython.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:116 commits, 6 PRs, 1 branch in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Jacob focused on optimizing the performance of the Cinder CPython project by refactoring the register allocator. They replaced `phmap` containers to improve performance. This optimization resulted in a 10-15% speedup in compilation time. They also implemented features for type-specialized calls, and async generator support, all within the project's code generation and runtime environments.
pythoninternaljitcinderruntime
facebook/hermes
Mar 2019 - Mar 2020
A JavaScript engine optimized for running React Native.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:36 commits, 1 PR in 1 year
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily contributed to the Hermes JavaScript engine, focusing on enhancing its functionality and developer experience. Their work included adding a new command to the `hbcdump` tool for analyzing profile data and adding an API to get HBC page access data. Furthermore, the user worked on fixing a bug related to object destructuring, and improving the build system to work with UBSAN, as well as integrating stack-trace data into chrome heap snapshots. These contributions demonstrate a solid understanding of the engine's internal workings and developer tooling.
javascript-enginereactreact-nativejavascriptoptimized
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