Owen Jacobson¶

• Hire Me.

  I've been a professional software developer since the early 2000s and an enthusiastic amateur even longer, and a manager of developers since 2019. I'm also deeply interested in organizational dynamics and group consensus: software, like ourselves, lives in a society, and both serves the needs of and serves to help shape that society.

• Code.

  I program computers. I have done so all of my adult life, and expect to do so as long as I can string concepts together. Like many lifelong programmers, I periodically write up interesting things I've developed, collaborated on, or run across.

  My larger projects are on Github.

• Papers of Note.

  Computer science and development-adjacent papers and academic works I encourage people to read.

• Gossamer.

  In 2014, long before Mastodon was in any kind of widespread use, I sketched out an idea for a fully-distributed status sharing network based on Twitter, but without the weakness of the Twitter, Inc. corporation. I've preserved the writeup here, as it's an excellent case study in how blindness to social violence can lead to dangerous software design. Gossamer should never be implemented, because it would put vulnerable users at extreme risk.

  In 2020, with Mastodon well established and the shape of distributed status networks much more widely understood, a friend pushed me to revisit the idea.

The best way to contact me is by email, but I'm present in many places. If you prefer that your mail not be read by others, my GPG key fingerprint is 77BDC4F16EFD607E85AAB63950232991F10DFFD0.