Hi, I'm Jake Coppinger.

I'm currently working as a full stack software engineer at Atlassian in the Linking Platform team, improving the features and reliability of Smart Link experiences in products like Confluence, Jira and Trello.

Say hello! I live in Sydney, Australia.
[email protected] | Blog | Github | Photography | LinkedIn

A little bit about me:

I'm currently working on Gatho (gatho.party), a platform for hosting small events. It supports one click RSVP links for guests, and can integrate with a Matrix group chat.
Recently I've worked on:
- Visualising realtime Sydney transit congestion data to find the cheapest way of improving service frequency and speed - see Sydney Transit Graph
- Helping Australians find convenient vaccine appointments with GPVaccineSearch.com
I'm a violinist in the Strathfield Symphony Orchestra. I was previously concertmaster of the Canberra Youth Philharmonic Orchestra and have played with the UNSW String Ensemble.
I dance salsa and bachata.
I ditched QWERTY 3 years ago and now write in Colemak on a Kinesis Advantage 2 (it's a concave, columnar, split, tented, mechanical keyboard with thumb keys!) I still write in QWERTY on MBP keyboards to stay fluent.
I grew up in Steiner, Montessori and public education.
I'm a proud cyclist, New Urbanism and transit advocate.
I presented at TEDxSydney 2014 in the Sydney Opera House in front of 2,250 people.
I'm a volunteer surveyor & editor for OpenStreetMap. Chances are you've encountered my small map improvements in Uber/Tesla routing/Instagram/Snapchat/Facebook maps. I occasionally volunteer with the Humanitarian OSM team supporting natural disaster recovery efforts.
I'm a photographer and occasional filmmaker. I cover a lot of architecture, transit infrastructure and landscape on the photography side.
My YouTube channel has ~4.7 million views.

Skills

Programming Languages:

Proficient: TypeScript, Python
Familiar with: C++17, SQL
Some experience with: C#, Rust

Tools & Frameworks:

Proficient: React, AWS, ProseMirror, Flask, Serverless Framework, Git
Familiar with: Webpack, Docker
Some experience with: OpenCV, NumPy, Postgres

Education

University of New South Wales — BSc Computer Science (Distinction)
UNSW Co-Op Scholarship
2016 - 2019

AI, Computer Vision, Neural Networks, Advanced C++, Distributed Systems, Algorithms, OS

UNSW Computing Elite Students Award
UNSW Dean's Honours List 2017

Gungahlin College (public, non-selective)
99.75 ATAR

Work

Atlassian, Linking Platform (Full Stack, P4 Software Engineer, Apr 2021-)

The Linking Platform team builds all smart link experiences in Atlassian. So far I have:

Reduced the cost of one of our microservices by 30.9%, and the entire team's AWS bill by 24%
Implemented a number of Salesforce Smart Links and improving OneDrive embeds
Feature-led a new service for resolving Bitbucket links, improving speed and reliability

Atlassian, Editor Platform (Frontend, Software Engineer, Jan 2020-Apr 2021)

Improved the performance, reliability and customer satisfaction of the Atlassian Editor, used by millions of monthly active users.

Led the implementation of the new date picker you see in Confluence to be keyboard accessible and easier to use

Won the Asia-Pacific company hackathon: I had an idea, formed a team, led the implementation and presented it!

Improved selection behaviour of a number of editor "nodes"

Improved reliability by preventing future regressions and improving test tooling

Mentored an intern

Westpac, Software Engineer, 6 month internship (2019)

Worked in a team to develop a green-field specialist finance C# .NET application. I helped improve their Agile work practices and development methods.

Atlassian, Software Engineer, 6 month internship (2018)

Worked with the front-end Editor platform team which builds an advanced WYSIWYG text editor used in production in many Atlassian products. It is an open-source React app using the Prosemirror toolkit written in TypeScript.

Building a rich text editor in a browser is challenging task - there is a huge amount of complexity which must function intuitively to all levels of users, along with a custom document format and robust real-time collaboration between users. I worked with tools such as Bolt, Browserstack and Jest.

Some highlights were:

Implementing a dark mode theme which will ship in the Jira mobile apps in collaboration with the native iOS and Android editor team
Proposing and implementing a change to the Atlassian Document Format used across Atlassian products
Improving the search algorithm to help users insert rich widgets more intuitively

News Corp Australia, 6 month internship (2017)

Worked in the front-end product development team and with a backend specialist on a relatively small from-scratch project to advance News Corp's front end stack, a Global Preference Centre for email newsletters www.newsletters.news.com.au. It uses Vue.js Server Side Rendering on AWS Lambda behind AWS API Gateway, using GraphQL as an abstraction for legacy systems.

Some things I worked on were:

Tooling for linking multi-repo structure (emulating a monorepo)
Front-end dev of the Vue.js app
Setting up a CI and testing workflow on Atlassian Bamboo using Docker
Implementing AWS Lambda deployments from Bamboo using the Serverless framework
On-demand feature branch deployments to Lambda using AWS API Gateway environment
JS unit tests, setting up Vue component tests using JSDOM, headless parallel Serverless screenshot integration tests
Load testing to determine the best Lambda CPU/RAM settings and cost
Improving SSR performance using AWS X-Ray tracing; ~300ms render time to ~50ms

Projects

Cloudspotting.app, 2019

(No longer in active development due to imagery licencing issues)

Weather radar simplified - a web app that shows every Bureau of Meteorology radar image animated on a slippy map in your exact location. I wrote a custom tileserver which georeferences BOM images and generates slippy map tilesets with Python GDAL and ImageMagick, served up to a Mapbox OpenGL slippy map using an OpenStreetMap cache.

Written in TypeScript (for web and Node) and Python. I also tinkered with FFT powered rain prediction!

Sydney Bus Departures, 2017 github.com/jakecoppinger/sydney-bus-departures

I created a simple API running on AWS Lambda & Heroku to query real-time Sydney bus arrivals using TfNSW's Trip Planner API. I also built a Pebble JS app to query my nearest favourite bus stops and get real-time departures. (I previously visualised Sydney transit data along with a short film/swiss poster: jakecoppinger.com/transit_in_sydney)

UrbanScribe, 2016

I developed a proof-of-concept system to enable A/B testing in architecture using computer vision. A laptop recognises pedestrians with OpenCV, sends their positions over WiFi to an Arduino which plots their position on a piece of paper.

Departing.io, 2015

A real-time bus arrivals app for Canberra to simply answer “When will my next bus come”. Built with a Python backend on Heroku which queries the ACT government's NXTBUS SIRI API and a JS front end that renders on a Canvas using Processing.js

Swirlesque, 2013

A system for interacting with IoT devices using hand gestures. I developed an Arduino based prototype with a low power gesture recognition algorithm, an Android app in Processing and a 3D printed casing through a year long independent research project while in year 12. I presented my research at TEDxSydney, Intel ISEF, BHPBSEA, Razorfish, CSIRO and was interviewed by University of Pennsylvania, SMH, The Australian, ABC News, 7:30 report, Ten and 7 News.