Jacob Salmela
Software Engineer V at Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inHome Server and Self-Hosting Solutions
Jacob Salmela is a Senior Software Engineer with 12 years of experience building robust infrastructure, automation, and HPC tooling across Linux and cloud environments. He combines deep systems expertise—dracut/initrd, cloud-init, BMC/Redfish, NTP, and storage/RAID overlays—with practical DevOps skills in Ansible, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and self-hosted GitHub Actions. At HPE he engineered custom initrd and cloud-init modules and authored an installation script that reportedly saved the company a substantial sum, reflecting a talent for high-impact, pragmatic engineering. A co-founder and contributor to the widely used Pi-hole project, he has worked on both backend ad-blocking scripts and front-end dashboard improvements, showing full-stack open-source fluency. Based in Minneapolis–St. Paul, he pairs hands-on coding in Go, Python, and Bash with operational rigor in large-scale deployments and HPC environments.
12 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors Degree, Bachelors Degree at Brown College
Github Skills (18)
scripting10
php10
script10
dns10
html10
sh10
nameserver10
shell10
webconfig9
dashboard9
css9
automation9
automations9
webserver9
pihole9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
pi-hole/pi-hole
Jun 2014 - Dec 2017
A black hole for Internet advertisements
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & DevOps Engineer
Backend Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:7 releases, 388 commits, 160 PRs in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily focused on developing and maintaining scripts for ad-blocking within the Pi-hole project. Their contributions include creating a shell script (gravity.sh) to generate and manage ad-blocking rules by pulling from a list of known ad servers. They also made changes to the lighttpd configuration and setup scripts and worked on the install script to configure the system properly.
raspberry-pidnsmasqad-blockerpi-holecloud
pi-hole/web
Jul 2015 - Dec 2017
Pi-hole Dashboard for stats and more
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 24 commits, 26 PRs in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily focused on developing the front-end interface for the Pi-hole dashboard. Their contributions included modifying HTML, CSS, and PHP files to implement new features, such as displaying ad-blocking statistics and donation links, and to improve branding and UI/UX. They also worked on integrating PHP code to fetch and display dynamic data within the dashboard interface, making the dashboard more interactive.
dashadminpiholepi-holestats
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.