Hi there!

I’m Jacob Enget, and I am thrilled you’ve taken the time to learn more about me!

Here on my website you’ll find personal projects of mine (a few recent, the rest many years old), my resume, and information on how to contact me.

About Me

I am a math and computer nerd, and I believe that good software can change the world.

Technology should be amazing. But oftentimes it’s exactly the opposite. I’m passionate about closing that gap by building software that is intuitive, reliable, and inspiring.

My Career So Far

I hope this high-level overview paints a picture of where I’m coming from and what my past experience means to me. In contrast, my resume details previous accomplishments of mine that I won’t directly address here.

Prelude: An Undercurrent of Math

My first academic love was math. Fun with numbers and computation drove my personal interests from a very young age1, and before I even knew what was what I had a math degree… shortly after, I realized I wanted a career doing something more social and emotionally creative.

So I put down the Rubik’s cube2 and followed my interests in animation and video games to earn a degree in computer science. Though to this day my mathematical appreciation drives my love for abstract foundations, beauty in symmetry, and solutions where math makes hard things easy!

Act 1: Video Games - 7 years

Shortly after obtaining my second degree I joined id Software to work on their suite of tools for building video games. I couldn’t have been more excited! My efforts contributed to the launch of both Rage and Doom. Later I joined the folks at Havok, in Ireland, to build from scratch a platform for content creation tools.

Through my years working in the video game industry I got a first-class lesson on the impact of both performance and software usability on a final product. I also learned how much I love helping others succeed!

Act 2: Expanding My Horizons - 7 years

Around this time my wife and I had our first child, making it more painful to live overseas and away from extended family. So we made the hard decision to move back to our corner of the US.

Minnesota was not home to many video game companies though! That, along with feeling like I was missing something by staying in the video game industry3, led me to explore the great wide open of the tech world.

I first joined a local friend at their startup (SenseAI) and worked on anything and everything that was needed, getting a crash course in backend and mobile development4. Then I worked at a consultancy (Nerdery) where I experienced the pleasure of customer-facing roles, drove some projects to success all on my own, and completed further crash courses in frontend development and big data.

By now I was both quite fond of the Scala programming language and excited for dedicated data engineering work, so I was thrilled to join a local company (Rally Health) in building a Spark-based data platform. I excelled in this role for a long while, growing further as a technical leader and appreciating a team and platform around me that I had a strong hand in building.

My perspective and confidence on how to solve problems with software flourished in these years, as did my understanding of what makes teams succeed: responsive listening, collaboration, and taking the time to understand a problem fully before committing to a solution. And the same passion of mine provided persistent direction: my love for building systems that help others achieve their vision.

Intermission: Touching Grass - 2 years

We all learned a lot from COVID, and I was left with a new perspective on life. When I saw before me the option to spend time with my children while they’re small I couldn’t pass it up, so I voluntarily stepped out of my job and into a childcare role within my family.

I led canoe camping trips to the wilderness of BWCA with extended family, started up a Dungeons & Dragons club at my kids’ school, and taught neighborhood kids how to build games in PICO-8.

My joy of programming also never left my side as I participated in The Recurse Center (a programmer’s retreat), became a student of the Rust programming language, and explored the WebAssembly ecosystem: attempting to create the canonical Doom WebAssembly module and building a parser of the WASM binary format.

This sabbatical, this selfish gift of time, allowed for investment in myself, my family, and the community around me.

What’s Next for Me

I’m excited to step out of my sabbatical and into an engaging role!

I dream of being in a technical position, surrounded by curious and empowered folks, doing work that enables users to create amazing things. I’m confident that in whatever work I do next I’ll make a strong positive impact, as I’ve done in the past5.

My optimal arrangement doesn’t require any specific industry, company structure, or technology stack6, as I have been consistently successful at adopting new tools to get the job done. I’m located in Minneapolis, MN, and don’t fancy moving but would be comfortable with remote work.

Areas Where I Have a Strong Interest

  • WebAssembly7
  • Software that faithfully delivers the full power of computers to users
    • Content-creation tools
    • Visual Programming8
    • End-User Programming9
  • Addressing the larger problems facing society10: climate change, healthcare access, lack of community
  • Programming language design

Thanks again for taking the time to learn more about me. I hope you enjoy looking around this site, and it would be great to hear from you!

Footnotes

  1. Fun fact: I was a two-time champion of the 𝜋 memorization contest at my high school. ↩

  2. Fun fact: I’d love to talk your ear off about Rubik’s cubes: solving them for speed, solving them while blindfolded, inventing your own solution algorithm from scratch! ↩

  3. At this time the video game industry felt siloed. Often I found myself reading about advancements happening elsewhere (e.g. the rise of React and similar front-end technologies) and thinking “They’re addressing many of the same problems we’re struggling with! Why aren’t we paying more attention to solutions invented elsewhere?!” ↩

  4. And getting a crash course on the choppy waters of startup financing, ugh. ↩

  5. Details of significant accomplishments are in my resume. ↩

  6. I do, however, really enjoy statically-typed programming languages, due to my preference for producing systems that others can confidently build upon. ↩

  7. I believe WebAssembly has a shot at really changing how we build software, and I’m inspired by how well designed and led this effort seems to be. ↩

  8. But done better, by pairing it with text-based programming, leveraging the usability sweet spots of both approaches (at least this is my dream…when I have a working prototype of this I’ll be sharing it) ↩

  9. End-User Programming: I’m thrilled I finally learned the phrase for this concept; it encompasses so many of my interests! ↩

  10. Admittedly, this list is a bit subjective, and somewhat US-specific. ↩