artisinal website content

about me

My name is Rory Jacob. I am a Canadian living in Seattle since 2013. I make music (sometimes), go to all sorts of shows, like to cook, sail, and host large-scale elaborate events, and working on over-engineered side projects. I am a software engineer by trade. I spent 9+ years at Amazon, with most of those on AWS Lambda. Most recently I worked at a startup called Vendia. Opinions are my own.

posts

projects

  • pig pit

    Pig pit is a yearly large potluck, music festival, event thrown by myself and my friend Elliot. The event started in 2021, and with the fourth one being held on July 27th, 2024. This website was created for Pig Pit 4: Ground Hog Day, with the main requirements being a place to show people the details about the event, a page to thank our volunteers, and a page showing a breakdown of our costs for the event.

    🐖🕳️ pigpit website roryj/pigpit

  • photobooth

    During the pandemic I needed a project to keep myself busy, so in preparation of a halloween event hosted by a friend of mine, I built a very simple photobooth app. The app takes four photos, "spookifies" them by applying random filters to each photo, and then generates a 1x4 image that can be printed from a photo printer. We have used this app at three Halloweens, as well as our pig pit event.

    roryj/photobomb

  • spooky tech

    This project is an all-in-one halloween house application. The app works as a client-server model. The server connects to all of the sensors in the house (we use ring and hue sensors), and the clients connect to light bulbs, speakers and chromecast devices. With the opening and/or closing of a door, we can trigger hand-crafted scenes; playing music, turning lights on and off, spookin' our friends.

    jmattfong/Halloween

  • das-keyboard second screen

    At some point in 2018 I bought the DasKeyboard 5Q, which is a keyboard with per-key programmable LEDs. The keyboard would run a local server on your connected device which you could send http commands to change key colours. I built an app that you edit and program different images that would scroll across the keyboard. The two base ones I had were a Canadian flag (of course), and a fish moving left to right.

    roryj/das-keyboard

  • samquest

    I wrote this as a demo for an AWS Lambda recruiting event back during my time on the team. The app is a turn based, multiplayer, choose your own adventure on twitter, built completely on AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and Amazon Kinesis. This was written back in 2017, back for the old twitter tweet API and no longer works.

    roryj/samquest