I'll try to give you some insights into who I am, at least from a professional point of view.

FIRST Robotics is an amazing organization that introduces students to the worlds of manufacturing, programming, arts and science. As a former FIRST student and regional Dean's List winner, FIRST is where I got my head in the door and never looked back.

Here I picked up soft skills such as teamwork and collaboration along with had skills such as 3D modeling, electrical diagram digestion and had my introduction to programming via Arduino and TI Rio for robotics related tasks.

As a gesture to the community that introduced me to so much, I along with others from our robotics team founded multiple FIRST Lego League teams at our local elementary schools. After providing the initial seed money and mentorship to get the program off the ground, we were successfully able to hand it off to the district.

After graduating high school through the running start program I was able to land a payed intership at OMAX Corporation, an abrasive waterjet manufactuer, as a mechanical engineer.

As an intern I would regularly recieve sketches of an idea that would have to be flushed out, drawn up. The largest thing I got to work on was a screen filter for the abrasive hoppers.

Along with the regular stuff I would often spend time after work designing and manufacturing small parts for my car. I sometimes miss the hands on work and freedom to produce physical products with leftover raw materials.

When interning at OMAX as a mechanical engineer I would spend my lunch breaks working on computer vision challenges related to the FIRST robotics challenge for the year. One lunch break a software engineer from the company walked by, asked what I was doing and proceded to "kidnap" me. Less than a week later I was now a software engineering intern.

I started by developing utilities such as "chamfer" and spiral lead-in tools for our 2D CAM software called Layout. After proving my skills I was hired on fulltime as a Jr. Software Engineer.

After being hired on full time I joined the 2 man team working on a from scratch 3D CAM application that would become known as IntelliCAM. My work skills proved to be worth a promotion from Jr. Engineer.

After some internal shuffling, layoffs, and management shifts we ended up loosing our lead developer and the person responsible for landing me on the team. This left me to lead development on IntelliCAM and see it through to it's official release.

When working at OMAX on IntelliCAM, we developed in a portable, cross platform fasion and explored mobile development with the Xamarin framework. I wanted to continue with this and found opportunity at Microsoft.

Here I was able to stretch my legs a bit developing custom data visualization components and their corresponding iOS, Android, and Windows Phone renderers. I also worked on a cross platform UI testing toolkit for automation.

After a descision at Microsoft came down to make the tool we were developing a web only experience I was thrown into the wild world of web development. Having past experience in PHP from college I was feeling pretty confident...

The thing is I shouldn't have been. Getting thrown into an enterprise level, multi-page, SSR'd React application was a bit of a reality check. I had much to learn.

Many long nights of reading and hacking together small projects quickly got me up to speed in modern web development but lead to a new issue: A love of bundlers and the rabbit hole that is optimization. Before the days of frameworks like Next.js, you had to roll your own SSR and code splitting solutions, something I am now an expert at.

The next major project I worked on was again with Microsoft, but this time on the Rewards team.

Here I honed my front-end React skills building complex data entry forms that allowed for business to easily work with 3rd party partners in the program to setup rewards, quizes, etc.

After working on Rewards I was transfered to be part of a new team that was forming called the "AI & Knowledge".

We would go on to build out two main tools, the first being a undirected graph visualization of the Microsoft Customer Master. This would be used by support staff and data scientists alike to find patterns and gain a deeper insight into customers.

The second tool was a Data Catalog that acted as a source of truth for data sets owned by teams throughout the company. The data sets would be marked with the relevant restrictions such as GDPR as well as documenting the type of system the data is stored in as well as the shape of the data. This was built using GraphQL and Neo4j for the backend and the frontend I used as a chance for my first exploration into React Hooks.

After leaving microsoft I wanted to explore engineering outside of a software company, this landed me at Alaska Airlines. Here I would contribute to the new payment processing system that spans Inflight and Airports. This included backend API work in ASP .Net Framework and ASP .Net Core projects as well as an Electron application to assist in re-processing or writting off transactions.

I also worked on modernizing an existing legacy system that handles automated customer phone routing to the relevant departements.

Now I'm not a yoga person by any means, but Lululemon has been my favorite place to work. The tech and people are just amazing!

Here I've developed everything from frontend customer facing UI components, federated GraphQL architectures, Webpack plugins, to A/B testing frameworks. Nothing is off limits and I get to share my experience and knowledge with others.

If you get the chance, work for Lululemon.

Code is not just a work activity for me. I enjoy complex systems. That's why on the side I enjoy working with bundlers such as Webpack and Rollup, as well as lighter things like exploring upcoming frameworks, ssr patterns, performance optimization, and more.

As a member of the Module Federation organization I have developed non-public facing features such as webpack runtime plugins to enable chunk streaming over whatever protocol you prefer. This means you can runtime federate your server rendered components over http just like you do in the browser.

I have also developed federated chunk preloading utilities that are in production at Lululemon running on the Next.js framework.

This site is also an experiment. It is a server side rendering ForgoJS application with a custom webpack loader to enable code splitting and chunk preloading.

I'm always doing R&D. There are too many things to list out and I'm always expanding. Hit me on twitter @ebey_jacob if you want to talk and hear more.