Jacob Howard
Principal Software Engineer at Docker, Inc
Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJacob Howard is a Principal Software Engineer with 14 years of experience building high-performance, cloud-native developer tooling and distributed systems, now shaping developer workflows at Docker after founding Mutagen. He blends deep systems and backend expertise—demonstrated by performance-sensitive contributions to mutagen’s multiplexer and Kubernetes-focused automation in garden—with practical DevOps experience maintaining container images and sync integrations. A recovering physicist with a DPhil from Oxford and a history of GPU-accelerated research at CERN, he brings rigorous analytical instincts to production engineering problems. Jacob is an entrepreneurial engineer who moves between founding products and contributing core optimizations to popular open-source projects, with an uncommon knack for squeezing latency and resource wins from complex I/O paths.
14 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Physics, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Physics at University of California, BerkeleyDPhil, Particle Physics, DPhil, Particle Physics at University of Oxford
Github Skills (27)
kubernetes10
filesystem10
container10
docker10
back-end-development10
file-operations10
dockers10
multiplexing10
go10
performance-optimization10
fileio10
kubernetes-pods10
mutagen10
architecture9
data-structure9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
mutagen-io/mutagen
Nov 2016 - Jan 2023
Fast file synchronization and network forwarding for remote development
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:117 releases, 5 reviews, 2494 commits in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Jacob Howard's contributions to the `mutagen-io/mutagen` repository focused on core functionality improvements. He implemented performance optimizations in the scan and transition processes by introducing a new window-based multiplexer implementation. Additionally, he enhanced the user experience by introducing more fine-grained session and state descriptions. He also made minor but significant improvements to the logging framework.
remote-development
garden-io/garden
Jan 2022 - Jun 2022
Automation for Kubernetes development and testing. Spin up production-like environments for development, testing, and CI on demand. Use the same configuration and workflows at every step of the process. Speed up your builds and test runs via shared result caching
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Backend Developer
DevOps Engineer & Backend DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 6 PRs, 7 comments in 5 months
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily contributed to the Kubernetes-focused automation project by updating and maintaining its dependencies, especially related to Mutagen, a tool for syncing files in Kubernetes environments. They refactored code to use Mutagen's environment variables and updated the Mutagen version across multiple commits. Their contributions also included updating container images and fixing bugs related to Mutagen's integration with the project, solidifying their role in both the backend and DevOps aspects of the project.
automationcachingkubernetestestingdeveloper-tools
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