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Jacob Meuser - Software Engineer

About me

I'm a software engineer with a background spanning Unix systems development, web applications, and more than 20 years running my own businesses.

I began building websites in 1999 while co-founding an online glass-art business. As the business grew, I moved from manually maintained pages to Perl and later PHP and MySQL, while also running our Internet infrastructure on OpenBSD. That work led me into the OpenBSD project, first through maintaining software ports and eventually into kernel development.

From 2006-2011, I contributed more than 800 kernel-level C commits across OpenBSD's audio and USB subsystems. I worked on device drivers, suspend/resume, device lifecycle and concurrency problems, and audio infrastructure, including the azalia(4) Intel High Definition Audio driver and sndio.

Alongside my technical work, I built a long career as a self-employed artist. I've now returned my professional focus to software engineering, bringing my application-development skills up to date while drawing on the systems experience and engineering judgment I developed through OpenBSD.

My current work brings those parts of my experience together. I'm building an OpenBSD Device Support Database and hwinspect, a C++ utility that examines hardware on an OpenBSD system and queries the database for support information. Together, they combine Unix systems knowledge with modern application development, databases, APIs, data processing, and user-contributed information.

Jacob Meuser

I'm particularly interested in software where correctness, maintainability, and understanding the underlying system matter. I enjoy working across boundaries—systems and applications, code and data, or low-level hardware information and the interfaces that make it useful.

Contact Me

Current Projects

OpenBSD Device Support Database

OpenBSD Device Support Database

Problem:
OpenBSD hardware support information is distributed across driver source code, system documentation, and other sources, and the names used by drivers often don't correspond to the product names users encounter.
Solution:
A searchable database that connects OpenBSD hardware identifiers and drivers with real-world device names, supplemented by user-submitted device reports with source information that can eventually be verified before being incorporated into the trusted dataset.
Technical:
Built a source-code parser for repeatably extracting hardware vendor and product IDs from drivers, along with a relational PostgreSQL data model, Next.js APIs, authentication, and device-report submission. The reporting model preserves source provenance and separates submitted data from verified device information while enforcing relationships between reports and their dependent records.
hwinspect

hwinspect

Problem:
OpenBSD provides hardware information through several system utilities, but no single view brings together the details of detected USB and PCI devices, including hardware identifiers, reported names, and attached drivers.
Solution:
hwinspect collects and organizes USB and PCI device information in one place, then queries the OpenBSD Device Support Database to supplement locally reported information with known device names and support data. The tool is also being developed as a future path for contributing hardware reports directly from an OpenBSD system.
Technical:
Built in C++20 with modular parsers for OpenBSD system-command output, libcurl HTTP requests, JSON processing, concurrent database lookups, and structured error handling. Saved command output is used as test data so parsing can be developed and verified without requiring access to every hardware configuration.

Skills

languages
CC++JavaScriptTypeScriptSQL
application development
Next.jsReactNode.jsREST APIsauthenticationdata modeling
databases and data
PostgreSQLPrismarelational database designdata extraction and transformation
systems
UnixOpenBSDsystems programmingdevice drivershardware/software integration
tools
GitGitHubVercelGitHub Copilot