Projects / Portfolio

A non-exhaustive list of interesting software projects I have developed or contributed to:

Personal Projects

Solar Screen Brightness

Repository: jacob-pro/solar-screen-brightness

• Created an automatic screen brightness adjuster that transitions smoothly between day/night levels using computed sunrise/sunset times for the user’s location.
• Cross-platform desktop application (Windows and Linux support).
• Features a configuration GUI with location picker, configurable brightness/transition settings and monitor overrides.
• Sunrise/sunset calculations provided using my own lightweight, reusable library (jacob-pro/sunrise-sunset-calculator).

Actix Extensible Rate Limit

Repository: jacob-pro/actix-extensible-rate-limit

• Created a flexible middleware supporting custom rate limit keys, dynamic limits, and request-context-aware policies.
• Designed pluggable abstractions for storage and limiting algorithms, allowing users to integrate their own custom backends.
• Provided reference backend implementations using Dashmap and Redis.
• Enabled advanced features: rollback on failed requests, custom error responses, detailed rate-limit headers.

WSL2 Dns Agent

Repository: jacob-pro/wsl2-dns-agent

• Windows tray agent to automatically fix WSL2 DNS configuration during VPN connection/disconnection.
• Makes WSL2 in NAT networking mode usable with corporate VPNs.
• Uses Win32 APIs to identify system DNS configuration based on interface metrics.

Open Source Contributions

Actix Multipart Extractor

Repository: actix/actix-web

• Initiated and led a community design discussion (#2849) to define requirements for typed multipart handling.
• Designed and implemented the resulting multipart/form-data extractor and derive macro (#2883).
• Enabled ergonomic, struct-based parsing of uploads (files, JSON, text, optional & list fields)
• Configurable size limits and async-safe streamed file handling to constrain memory usage.

Rust Brightness API

Repository: stephaneyfx/brightness

• Implemented support for external monitors and laptop screens on Windows by creating a safer, more ergonomic wrapper around the Win32 brightness APIs.
• Refactored the library’s API into async and blocking variants, improving usability, correctness, and consistency across platforms (#10).

Smaller Contributions

lettuce-io/lettuce-core: Fix for TLS CA-only verification (#2329), improvements made to refresh logging (#2338).

juhaku/utoipa: Added support for various parts of the OpenAPI specification (multiple PRs).

OpenAPITools/openapi-generator: Various improvements to the Rust code generators (multiple PRs).

tmccombs/tls-listener: Added native-tls (#7) and openssl (#21) library support, made it possible to reload TLS certificates at runtime (#11), with examples (#25).

lettre/lettre: Added support for configuring local IP addresses (#762), added functions to allow access to the TLS peer certificate (#716).

Turasa/libsignal-service-java: Fix to ensure that the WebSocketConnection respects the ConnectionSpecs (#28).

libvirt/libvirt-rust: Fix invalid functions, added test case to ensure symbols are valid (#14).

Undergraduate Projects (2018-2021)

Some interesting software projects during my degree at the University of Bristol (2018-2021):

COMS10009 Object Oriented Programming (Y1):
https://github.com/jacob-pro/scotland-yard
A game written using JavaFX. I developed a substantial extension to the game to support online multiplayer using websockets.

COMS20805 Software Product Engineering (Y2, Group Project):
A group project to develop a prototype app for the Bristol Medical School ‘coMforT’ to be used for ‘Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy’.
- Developed the backend server using Java, Spring Boot, Hibernate, Postgres, and OpenAPI, with extensive integration tests.
- Setup a CI/CD pipeline using CircleCI to compile/test the sever, OpenAPI client libraries, Android app, and deploy to Amazon Elastic Container Registry.
- Made contributions to the Android app (Java)

COMS20001 Concurrent Computing (Y2):
https://github.com/jacob-pro/game-of-life
High performance concurrent implementations of Conway’s Game of Life, written in Go and Rust.
https://github.com/jacob-pro/arm-kernel
Developed a basic operating system kernel targeting ARM Cortex; using Rust and C in an unhosted / bare-metal environment.

COMS30046 - Advanced Computer Architecture (Y3)
https://github.com/jacob-pro/processor-simulator
Implemented an out-of-order superscalar processor simulator, capable of running small programs compiled for the ARM Cortex M0 instruction set in ELF format.

Createanet (2017-2018)

Commercial projects while employed at Createanet (Aug 2017 - Aug 2018):

hrn - world ratings
Developed an iOS social media and reviews app (Objective-C) and the entire REST API to power it (PHP/MySQL).
Features included user profiles with photo, video and status posts, a timeline, comments, and push notifications.

Punti Verdi
Developed the iOS app (Objective-C) for a coffee shop rewards program.

GEAV Contractor Control
Developed an iOS health and safety forms app (Objective-C).
Implemented a form controls library configurable with JSON (text input, radio buttons, dropdowns, signature input, etc.).
Also performed substantial maintenance on the REST API and admin website codebase (PHP/MySQL).

Circles
Redeveloped the iOS app (Swift) as well as the REST API (PHP/MySQL) for a group video call app.

Sentimento
Jointly developed the iOS app (Objective-C) for a photo and card sharing platform.

myAllergy Passport
Developed the iOS app (Objective-C) for sharing allergy information.

Whitecroft Lighting
Developed the website (PHP/MySQL) used to administer their sales management app.