Robin Jacobs

Developer & open-source enthusiast

CV [View source]

Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer @ Rapid7

Dublin, Ireland

2/'22 - 10/'23

Full-time

An an extension of my experience as a Software Engineer II working for Rapid7 (see below), during my role as a Senior Software Engineer I have taken on the role of team lead and Scrum Master on the sprint team responsible for account management, RBAC and Platform integration within the company.

One of the big projects that I have taken on during my time in this role is for a new authentication service. As the lead of this project, my responsibilities include the spec, design, and leading the implementation of this service, discussing with and obtaining buy-in from stakeholders, and splitting the work up into highly parallelisable tasks for the team to work on with clearly defined feature milestones for the project.

Dublin, Ireland

7/'17 - 2/'22

Full-time

During my time at Rapid7, I have worked extensive on the company's log search product (InsightOps), including the log search engine, alerting, REST APIs and integrations with several AWS services.

My biggest project during my role as an Software Engineer II has been the development of an RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) Platform service. I was heavily involved in this project from the initial design and implementation stages all the way through to customer migrations, over a period of 3 years, with leadership and ownership over the project being transfered over to me one year into the project. Aside from the technical challenges, this involved coordination across teams and offices to align integration with and migration to this new service.

I have also led the design and implementation of the product's AWS CloudTrail integration, and successfully launched the service for customers.

During my time at Rapid7 I have also been extensively involved in:

  • Development of functionality, fixing of issues, and the handling of third-party pull requests on Github on the company's ingestion libraries. These libraries allow customers to send their log data into the log search engine, and are written in a variety of languages including Java, Python, Javascript, Ruby, PHP and C#.
  • Automation of developer workflows and migration of problematic acceptance testing and build setups to a Docker container-based approach.

Using mostly Java and Python, employing TDD/BDD development practices.

Technologies: JavaPythonDockerVert.xDropwizardCassandra

PHP Developer & Sysadmin @ Webtown

Letterkenny, Ireland

9/'16 - 7/'17

Full-time

Development of a custom-built management and monitoring solution used to perform common maintenance tasks on and monitor the health and performance of 300+ customer websites which were each built with a variety of different CMS' and frameworks, and development of plugins for each of the used CMS' and frameworks to report back to and allow management by the central management and monitoring system in a secure manner.

Other responsibilities included:

  • Development of custom CMS functionality, either as a custom-built solution or as a set of plugins for existing CMS' such as Wordpress and WooCommerce
  • Developing functionality for and fixing issues with the company's pre-existing classified ads system, which was built with the CodeIgniter PHP framework
  • Search engine optimisation (SEO) on customers' websites
  • Setup and maintenance of several different Linux servers running Debian, Ubuntu Server and CentOS. Most of these servers were running a standard LAMP (Linux + Apache + MariaDB + PHP) stack, with others running custom-built applications, internal tooling, and e-mail services.

Technologies: PHPLaravelWordPressWooCommerceCodeIgniterMariaDBDebianCentOS

Node.js Developer @ CloudRanger

Letterkenny, Ireland

3/'16 - 6/'17

Full-time, college internship

Development of an API service using Node.js, Express, and DynamoDB as the database. This API was consumed by an AngularJS frontend as well as a Scala agent responsible for interfacing with external services and hardware devices, and (aside from the database) used Amazon S3 as a storage backend.

CloudRanger later got acquired by Druva.

Technologies: Node.jsExpress.jsDynamoDB

Web Developer @ Heuvel-Folie-Serres

Sint-Lenaarts, Belgium

8/'10 - 12/'15

Part-time, during high school & college

Development of several websites for the company, with custom-built CMS systems where needed.

Functionality includes ability for employees of the company to manage websites’ contents including uploading pictures, after which pictures will be processed by the CMS (resize, compress, apply watermark, …).

Every website functions as a standalone web application, but limited (as desired) integration between websites was implemented.

This was my part-time job throughout my high school and college education.

Technologies: PHPLaravelMariaDB

Personal Projects

Sprint Retrospective

One of those projects that started out as a throwaway experiment to play with some different technologies, and happened to turn into something useful.

"How do these new React Hooks work?" turned into "Let's hook this up to an API and a database... I wonder what MongoDB is like?" and quickly became a full Kubernetes cluster with each component of the application running in Docker containers that are auto-scaling and load balanced across several Kubernetes nodes.

The project currently consists of:

  • React frontend
  • Node.js API server
  • Node.js websocket server
  • MongoDB, as the database
  • Redis, for storage of temporary data such as active participants, and real-time streaming of activity on a retrospective through the use of Redis Pub/Sub

Technologies used: ReactNode.jsTypeScriptExpress.jsMongoDBRedisRedis Pub/SubDockerKubernetes

DistroHopper

Custom home screen replacement for Android with themes resembling various Linux distributions as well as a search feature with support for several (internal and external) search sources.

This is a spare-time project I started when I was in high school, which I am still working on based on feedback users leave on the Google Play Store, or on the Github repository. The codebase has however seen a couple of rewrites in the meantime.

Technologies used: JavaAndroid SDK

SINControl

Control panel for both users and administrators of a Debian server.

Ability to manage system users, Apache vHosts, FTP-accounts, e-mail addresses and forwards, run system maintenance tasks, …

This was built during my time volunteering for the Student Information Network (SIN) organisation at Thomas More University of Applied Sciences.

Technologies used: PHPLaravelMariaDB

Integration with: ApacheProFTPDPostfixMariaDBownCloudCron

Volunteering Experience

System administrator & developer @ Student Information Network (SIN)

Geel, Belgium

9/'13 - 8/'16

Volunteering as a system administrator and web developer for a student organisation offering web hosting, tech support, and other web services (including cloud storage) to students of the college.

Because of my volunteering I learnt a lot about Linux system administration and virtualisation as well as gained more experience in PHP development and integration with other services.

Coach @ CoderDojo Belgium

Geel, Belgium

1/'15 - 6/'16

Guiding children between the ages of 7 and 18 years old in learning basic programming principles in a playful environment.

The CoderDojo for which I volunteered offered a multitude of trajectories for the kids to follow, including Scratch, Python, Arduino, HTML/CSS and C#.

Mentor @ CoderDojo Letterkenny

Letterkenny, Ireland

9/'15 - 2/'16

Guiding children between the ages of 7 and 18 years old in learning basic programming principles in a playful environment.

This CoderDojo mainly focused on teaching kids basic programming logic with Scratch.

Mentor @ Teen-Turn

Dublin, Ireland

9/'19 - 12/'19

Teen-Turn aims to provide teen girls the opportunity to gain hands-on technology experience so that they can visualise themselves in those kinds of careers and therefore make third level course choices accordingly.

Winner EU Digital Impact Organisation of the Year

(Non-Programming) Languages

  • Dutch: Native Speaker
  • English: Bilingual Proficiency (CEFR level C2)
  • French: Notions

Education

Applied Computing @ Letterkenny Institute of Technology

Letterkenny, Ireland

9/'15 - 2/'16

  • "Semester" abroad (that was 8 years ago, so... a very long semester?)
  • 4th year Honours Degree Applied Computing
  • Special Purpose Award in Social/Civic Engagement

Applied Computer Science @ Thomas More University of Applied Sciences

Geel, Belgium

9/'13 - 6/'16

  • Bachelor Applied Computer Science with a semester abroad at Letterkenny Institute of Technology and an internship abroad at CloudRanger (Druva).

Industrial Sciences & Applied Computing @ SO-Zenit

Turnhout, Belgium

9/'07 - 6/'13

  • High school education