My name is Jacob Budin, and I’m a technical director.

For the past fifteen years, I’ve been building, overseeing, and leading technology projects for companies including American Express, Apple, Discover, MasterClass, Peloton, SoFi, and Zocdoc.

I’ve launched many web and mobile digital products for Fortune 500 companies and start-ups alike, including Webby Award-winning work.

While my experience lies in building teams to develop transformative web experiences, my interests run through the intersection of management theory and automation workflows.

Building technology products

My work spans a gamut of technologies including:

• Modern client-side applications (SPAs) using JavaScript and TypeScript, using frameworks including React and Vue and related technologies (e.g., Next.js, Redux)
• Traditional server-side and microservice architectures using Node.js, Python, PHP, Java, and Go, and their more popular frameworks
• Native and non-native mobile development for iOS and Android platforms
• Cloud infrastructure and services, including self-service (AWS, Google Cloud) and full-service (Netlify, Vercel), as well as platforms for content delivery, monitoring, logging, analytics
• Fundamentals of DevOps, CI/CD, bundling, testing, i18n, security, compliance, and performance optimization

But at the heart of what I do is realizing the greatest potential of teams of engineers, designers, strategists, and other domain specialists. Through planning, processes, and collaboration, I help create products that users love.

My guiding philosophy

Successful projects are borne from a singular vision and a host of supporting systems, including people, culture, and tools.

Stake a vision. As a leader, take responsibility for the project, establish key roles, and see it through its most challenging decisions. This requires maintaining morale, removing obstacles, and setting the bar for excellence. Most importantly, possess enough self-awareness to know when the course is lost and how to correct.

Projects vary, so adopt tools and processes lightly at first, and if they fail, discarded easily. They should evolve to match a team’s specific needs. Prefer tools that are too simple than too complex.

Prioritize sharing knowledge. Writing provides an outlet for a system’s complications and introduces opportunities for new collaborations. While reading allows the self-motivated to improve their understanding of systems and hone their skills.

Lastly, take moments to reflect on questions of value: How can the work be done more efficiently, with greater correctness and less friction? Is the work resilient and adaptable? Whose interests does the work prioritize?

Also a programmer

A selection of my open source projects:

• City Score (Python) – Score and rank US cities and towns to find the best city for you
• Portable Wisdom (Python, on PyPI & Docker Hub) – Generate EPUB files from unread Instapaper articles
• plist-parser (JavaScript, on npm) – XML Property List (.plist) parser

Or more generally:

• GitHub — 20+ public repositories since 2013
• Stack Overflow — 10k+ reputation since 2011

So get in touch

Email self@jacobbudin.com or download my résumé

Everything else

• Where I’ve Skied (2025)
• Missoula v. Bozeman (2023)
• Portland v. Seattle (2023)
• How to Quickly Update AWS Route 53 Domains’ Contacts (2022)
• The Vegetarian Weightlifter’s Diet (2022)
• The $200 Lettuce (2022)
• Antisocial Streets (2021)
• Missisquoi Valley Rail Trail (2021) (2021)
• Vermont: The First Year (2021) (2021)
• Japan (2018) (2021)
• How to Detect User Log-in Across Browser Tabs (2017)
• PHP 7 (and 7.1) in a Nutshell (2017)
• How to Dust Off an Old Raspberry Pi (2017)