About
I'm Jack Schaffer. I grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, went to the University of Michigan for statistics and entrepreneurship, and live in Charlottesville, Virginia now.
By day I am Head of Engineering at VerifyYou. Hickory Labs is my own company. It houses my pet projects and whatever else I feel like building, lately with a lot of coding agents doing the typing. What is being built right now is on the front page.
The things I like most: software engineering, the technology underneath it, and building the engineering teams that do it well. Lately that means AI in every part of the work, from the tools on my laptop to the product on the screen, and I am having a great time.
I am married to Ali Gregg, CFO of The Market at Grelen, her family's place in Somerset, Virginia: a thousand-acre tree nursery, a garden shop and cafe, a few places to stay, and a wedding venue that does its part to keep Virginia for lovers.
Mail is jack@hickorylabs.dev. Code is on GitHub, the rest is on LinkedIn.
The name
I grew up at the corner of Hickory Grove and Chestnut Run in Bloomfield Hills, and then I married into a family that grows trees for a living. When it came time to name the company, the trees had already decided. The dot on the i in the wordmark is a hickory leaflet.
The road here
Head of Engineering, VerifyYou
Human verification: proving there is a real, unique person behind an account without asking that person to hand over their identity. Remote, from Charlottesville.
Engineer, then engineering manager, Cohere Health
Five years, from Software Engineer II to Senior Engineering Manager. Ran the platform teams across four countries, built the event-driven integration platform, and took electronic prior authorization to more than fifty health systems.
Software Engineer, JPMorgan Chase
Wholesale payments in Chicago. Kafka and Spring microservices for payment processing and acknowledgements.
Assistant Instructor, Northwestern University Data Science and Visualization Boot Camp
Python, big data, and visualization on nights and weekends, through a pandemic, fully remote.
Assistant data scientist and lecturer, University of Michigan
Wrote and recorded the Python side of Statistics with Python on Coursera, which has since passed ninety thousand learners.
College, all of it at once, University of Michigan
A B.S. in Statistics with a minor in Entrepreneurship. Around it: a co-op at American Axle writing plant floor traceability in C#, TechLab at Mcity, which paired me with Tome to build an IoT pedestrian classifier, the Office of Academic Innovation, Dawn White’s faculty-sponsored startup Perisense, a healthcare analytics internship at Improvement Path Systems, and the Michigan club baseball team.
The first job, Dunkin’ Donuts
Bloomfield Hills. Opened on weekends, and Sundays were insane. Closed on weeknights after baseball and football practice. This is where the coffee habit formed, and everything I have done since runs on it.