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About Me

Headshot of Jesse Porch

Technology should enhance our humanity, not distort it. As an experienced software developer, my goal is to create and disseminate quality software that respects the whole person of its users and truly makes their lives better. Such work should be polished, humane, effective, and dependable. As such, I hold myself to a high standard of competence in academic study, personal research, and professional performance. My attention to detail and conscientiousness are both driven by a commitment to excellence and integrity in everything I do.

Both as a professional developer and a research fellow, I have always sought to integrate all elements of my life. My studies in the realms of anthropology, literature, and philosophy, stem from the idea that the most effective developers must cultivate a strong interest in many things outside math and technology. A life well-lived is an integral part of who I am as a software professional, and I value my non-technical skills just as highly as my professional expertise. Because of this I am well-prepared to focus on the details of implementation while maintaining a firm grasp on the broader meaning of the tasks I undertake.

Supported by my technical proficiency and commitment to healthy relationships, I aspire to grow in leadership responsibility so that I can contribute to both the creation of exemplary software and to the development of a sustainable culture that supports it.

Work Experience (Inquiries)

January 2021–April 2026 At SimpliSafe I worked on the Core Platform and User Systems teams, helping maintain and modernize established services. My work combined hands-on engineering with investigation of legacy behavior, migration planning, and coordination with the teams that depended on those systems. Selected projects and contributions: Preactivations redesign: Led the redesign of a business-critical service that let customers supply setup information before their security systems arrived. I authored the architecture documents, implementation tickets, and release plan, and reviewed and tested contributions from junior developers and contractors. Migration and validation: Designed a just-in-time migration strategy that avoided a bulk migration of in-flight orders, minimized cutover requirements for dependent teams, and preserved rollback capability. I worked with a Staff Engineer and integration stakeholders to verify legacy behavior through code walkthroughs, redesigned the object model around business needs, and reimplemented orchestration logic to eliminate identified unrecoverable error paths. I also standardized metric definitions and managed instrumentation of the legacy system to establish a reliable baseline. The launch showed no perceptible decline in preactivation throughput and did not require rollback. Message-processing services: Developed a reusable template for lightweight message-processing services that provided the foundation for approximately six deployed services. (Rust) Core-service framework migration: Carried out the migration from axum 0.7 to 0.8, addressing breaking routing changes across internal tooling in collaboration with the responsible Distinguished Engineer. (Rust/axum)

August 2016–December 2020 At Harvard Law School I worked on the Business Solutions team within the IT Department. My role combined application development with research, release planning, and coordination across the departments using and supporting those systems. Selected projects and contributions: Media Services archival tool: Researched, designed, and implemented a configurable archival tool for the Media Services library. Its flexible design supported adoption for additional archival projects. (Amazon Glacier) Faculty Bibliography: Implemented the frontend from architectural wireframes, working with the architect responsible for the Elasticsearch-backed publication search. (Elasticsearch) Website release process: Helped establish business-hours website releases by reassessing deployment risks and presenting the proposed change to IT leadership and Communications stakeholders. Student information system upgrades: Served as Scrum Master for coordinated upgrades to the student information system, database engine, and underlying virtual machine alongside frontend updates. I worked with Communications and Infrastructure stakeholders to plan go-live timing and validation procedures; the team delivered the updates in a single deployment.

Writing and editing: 2016–2017, with subsequent intermittent contributions; technical stewardship: 2021–present At Haywire, I wrote and edited videogame criticism, including the Playing For Real column. I edited contributed writing from pitch toward publication, with particular attention to line editing that improved clarity while preserving each writer's voice and intent. I assumed hosting and maintenance responsibility for the publication's WordPress site as its existing hosting arrangement became insufficient for ongoing platform needs. I designed and implemented a Codex-assisted transition from WordPress to static hosting to reduce maintenance demands and mitigate pressing security concerns.

August 2015–May 2016 At Trinity Fellows Academy, I conducted independent research and authored a thesis and supplemental essays during an interdisciplinary fellowship focused on leadership and engagement with contemporary issues. I coordinated a team of 12 Fellows for two major external events: Recruiting Weekend and Alumni Visitation. I also scheduled weekly duty shifts to balance Fellows' individual availability against the group's commitment to service in the associated retreat center.

June 2011–May 2015 At InterSystems I worked in Application Services, the company's center of excellence for internal development. Alongside application development, I helped teams adopt shared tools and practices and mentored five interns, helping them break down tasks, implement changes, and guide their work through deployment. Selected projects and contributions: Change Control Record (CCR): Developed and maintained an internal application implementing branching, deployment, and change-documentation workflows around Perforce. As an early contributor, I implemented workflow changes and resolved defects in response to internal-user feedback as adoption expanded to development for external clients. (Perforce) Shared libraries and development practices: Defined and published reusable foundations for teams across the organization. I supported broader adoption of the team's development workflow through documentation and training.

May–July 2009 As part of Grove City College's Sweezy Research Fellowship, I developed an integer ray-tracing pipeline and supporting research tools in C++ and Assembly for specialized hardware. I co-authored the peer-reviewed paper Integer Ray Tracing, published in the Journal of Graphics, GPU, and Game Tools, and the research poster Toward Stream Filtered Ray Tracing on a DSP. (See Portfolio.)

Education

2015-2016 Weekly rotation of guest lecturers speaking on a variety of topics such as psychology, theology, political philosophy, social justice, and environmental stewardship. The curriculum coordinated by Dr. Syman Stevens, and included a range of respected speakers such as Dr. Os Guiness, Andy and Catherine Crouch, and Curt Thompson. Each fellow was responsible for a year-long independent research project on a subject of their choosing, and a written thesis and multiple supporting essays. Parts of my writing have been published at First Person Scholar (Portfolio)

2007-2011 ABET-accredited Computer Science department headed by Dr. William Birmingham. Advised by Dr. Christiaan Gribble. In addition to classes required for graduation, I pursued additional mathematics classes (Linear Algebra, Statistics Theory), summer research in mathematics and computer graphics (also under Dr. Gribble) published in the Journal of Graphics, GPU, and Game Tools. In addition to my Computer Science and math classes, I studied electives such as Technical Management, Creative Writing, and Fantasy Literature.

Portfolio (RSS)

Tangere Integer Ray Tracer This site by Jesse M. Porch. Valid HTML and CSS.