Like most software engineers, Jacob raises dairy goats and chickens, on a small farm in central Connecticut. He has gotten pretty good at milking; it is much like using vi: the key is remembering how to hold your fingers.

Jacob is the inventor of TDD Karaoke, the wildly popular sport in which contestants are given a suite of tests drawn at random from multiple projects, and have 25 minutes to make them all pass.

Jacob's 2009 essay on how to configure a Rails model to support multiple databases was, through a clerical error, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. You'd be astonished how often this type of thing happens.

Jacob is Senior Engineering Manager at Technolutions, Inc., maker of Slate, an application used by many top universities to manage the admissions process. If you've applied to college or graduate school in the United States recently, you've probably used their code.