Hi, I'm Jake.

The tool I'd wanted for the previous decade. At Yahoo, a single feature's dependencies could span three to five teams, and nothing we used could show the shape of the work across the org chart. CardPath is a visual work graph for mapping those dependencies and understanding how the work fits together, and I build it every day with coding agents, as founder, product, designer, and engineer.

I work privately with engineering leaders, from senior engineers leading without authority to directors leading through managers. Some earned promotions; some secured promotions and pay adjustments for the people on their teams. A lot of it now is bringing AI into their teams, including inside large enterprises early in their adoption.

I was a Director of Engineering at Yahoo, leading an org of about 40 engineers across four managers. I was responsible for the content platform behind Yahoo Mail, Finance, Sports, and Search, plus the AOL and HuffPost brands, and the editorial tools thousands of editors used every day. The org was globally distributed, and most of it came to me through reorgs; I organized each arriving team into the four we ran with and developed three engineers from inside the org into first-time managers. I became a manager in 2017 over the systems I'd been building at AOL, and I left in 2023.

I worked as a principal engineer on the platform behind AOL.com, HuffPost, Engadget, and Autoblog: the move from on-prem to AWS, the auth layer the internal editorial tools ended up using, a UGC contributor network for Engadget. I wasn't a manager there. I was leading. The auth layer ran for the rest of my ten years there, long after I'd stopped writing code for it.

My one stint outside publishing. I was the senior architect for an e-commerce company in Miami, moving the storefront between platforms and rebuilding the affiliate payment system with fraud prevention in front of it. Performance work there was conversion work.

PHP and MySQL web apps for clients, most of them publishers, plus the servers they ran on. I worked from home in Birmingham, Alabama, back when remote was unusual, and I've worked remotely most of the years since.

As an infantryman I didn't write code, but I did learn the discipline and operational rigor that I still carry with me into my career. I also had the opportunity to learn a bit about signals processing, which I now tinker with in my home lab.

Where it started, in high school: templates for writers on Blogger and Movable Type, sites for web publications and podcasts, custom WordPress plugins. Some of it paid. All of it was for people who wrote for a living, and that never really changed.