Jakob Petsovits
Volunteer Software Developer at KDE
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJakob Petsovits is a volunteer software developer based in Toronto with 20 years of experience building robust C++ systems, back-end architectures, and developer tooling. Raised and educated in Austria, he has worked across speech recognition, browser engines, P2P networking, and web platforms—from SoundHound’s production ASR servers to BlackBerry’s WebKit graphics ports. He’s contributed to notable open-source projects such as KDE and libtorrent, focusing on build systems, code quality, and cross-compiler compatibility, and has improved MessagePack’s C++ support for modern containers and object handling. More comfortable with system design and APIs than UI polish, he nevertheless participates in QML-based desktop work for KDE Plasma 6 during a sabbatical. Jakob is pragmatic, quick to learn, and motivated by user-empowering, community-driven platforms that resist anti-competitive “enshittification.” Fluent in collaborative, distributed development practices, he also brings experience porting legacy build systems to CMake and mentoring engineers in production environments.
20 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Vienna University of TechnologyMandarin Chinese Language Course, Mandarin Chinese Language Course at Ocean University of China
German, English
Github Skills (13)
c-language10
cmake10
cpp10
messagepack10
cprogramming-language10
bittorrent10
testing9
c119
template-metaprogramming9
build-system9
c179
memory-management9
debugging8
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
arvidn/libtorrent
Jun 2015 - May 2016
an efficient feature complete C++ bittorrent implementation
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & QA Engineer
Backend Developer & QA EngineerContributions:9 PRs, 39 comments, 4 issues in 10 months
Contributions summary:Jakob primarily focused on improving the codebase's quality and build process by addressing compiler warnings and potential symbol clashes, suggesting a focus on code correctness and maintainability. They also updated the CMake build scripts to improve compatibility. Furthermore, the user fixed outdated C bindings, ensuring the project continues to build. These changes indicate a role in maintaining the build system and improving overall code stability and reliability.
bittorrentcpp
msgpack/msgpack-c
Sep 2014 - Nov 2015
MessagePack implementation for C and C++ / msgpack.org[C/C++]
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 4 PRs, 39 comments in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Jakob primarily contributed to the core functionalities of the msgpack-c library. Their work included enhancing the library's compatibility with modern C++ features, such as `std::unordered_map` and `std::unordered_set`, ensuring broader support across different compilers. Furthermore, the user added support for object conversions within the library, specifically for `object::with_zone` to facilitate memory management. They also implemented and tested features related to object copying.
cppmessagepack
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