Bill Jacobs

I was the sole creator of the Paper Pickaxe website (AWS, Java, React, GraphQL, Relay, ES6, jQuery, Python, Django, and OpenGL).

Paper Pickaxe enables users to bring their Minecraft creations to life, using the art of paper crafting. It takes a piece of a Minecraft world as input and automatically generates a PDF file the user can print, cut out, and fold into that shape.

RedBlackNode is a Java implementation of red-black trees that supports arbitrary augmentation. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, making it theoretically possible for developers to solve a wide range of problems that benefit from augmentation but are also easy and practical.

Typically these applications efficiently locate a set of points of interest in a given map region, then quickly determine whether two vertices are connected in a changing graph and efficiently identify the nth largest item in a changing list of items.

I was the sole developer responsible for expanding Facebook's MVC framework for PHP—which at the time supported only the minimalist subdomain Lite.facebook.com—to support Facebook's mobile website.

I rewrote the majority of the mobile site to use the framework. Later, the bulk of the Facebook desktop site was moved to this framework which I continued to maintain.

I designed and implemented a framework for performing automated UI testing of Facebook's iPhone app.

The framework is written in Objective-C, as are the test cases. Using Objective-C enables the tests to make calls to the app's native code. The design is single-threaded and asynchronous, and it allows asynchronous methods to be composed.

At Facebook, I was the primary developer responsible for designing and implementing a GraphQL API for the dynamically generated navigation links, internally referred to as "bookmarks."

This required redesigning and rewriting major portions of the bookmarks code, in order to modernize the code and present a uniform interface that could be consumed not just by the desktop site, but also by the iPhone and Android apps. The API is designed to handle different categories of bookmarks (such as applications, groups, and events), ranking within each category, paging through results, and several other details. We were careful to do this in a way that coheres with the rest of the PHP codebase, accounts for the differences between all of the interfaces, deals with the lack of a frontend for some features on some app and web releases, and hopefully enables future changes to the system without requiring breaking changes to the API.

Using Ruby on Rails and JavaScript, another Skytap developer and I implemented staged VM startup in order to start a set of virtual machines in a particular order.

The goal was to support use cases where one machine needs to be ready to service requests before another VM starts, such as when a web server needs to be able to immediately connect to a database server, as soon as the web server starts running.

We implemented the simple approach of allowing the user to specify startup delays so that we waited a specified amount of time before booting each VM. This setting is attached to each group of VMs so instead of needing to specify the delays each time the user starts a VM group, he only needs to configure it once, and the "boot VM group" button will have the desired effect from then on.

WrapAsYouType is a plugin for the text editor Sublime Text. The plugin automatically performs hard word wrapping within specified file sections in real time as the user types. For example, WrapAsYouType can limit lines of C++ code contained in block comments (between /* and */) and sequences of line comments (after //) to a width of 80 columns. This reduces developer time by eliminating some of the grunt work in writing documentation.