About
I'm Jack Schaffer. I grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and went to the University of Michigan for statistics and entrepreneurship. These days I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I run engineering at VerifyYou and, on the side, Hickory Labs.
Hickory Labs LLC is my software company. We build products, Groventory for nurseries and V Formation for running AI agents from your phone, and we work with companies on their own projects, from a first conversation to shipped software. A small flock of agents does most of the typing while I decide what gets built and whether it's any good.
What I like most is the work itself, the software, the systems underneath it, and the teams that build it well. I've been lucky to get to do all three, first as an engineer and then leading engineers. Right now AI is in every part of that work, from the tools on my laptop to the product on the screen, and honestly I'm having the most fun I've had in years.
I'm married to Ali Gregg, who runs the finances at The Market at Grelen, her family's business in Somerset, Virginia. It's a thousand-acre tree nursery with a garden shop and cafe, a few spots to stay, and a wedding venue that does its part to keep Virginia for lovers.
If you're building something like this, or stuck on something I've written about, or just want to say hi, mail is jack@hickorylabs.dev and I'd love to hear from you. For a project, hello@hickorylabs.dev reaches us, and the first call is free. The code is on GitHub. More about me is on LinkedIn.
The name
I grew up at the corner of Hickory Grove and Chestnut Run, and then I married into a family that grows trees for a living. By the time it came to pick a name, the trees had already decided. The dot on the i in the wordmark is a hickory leaflet.
The road here
Head of Engineering, VerifyYou
Leading the engineering team. Remote, from Charlottesville.
Engineer, then engineering manager, Cohere Health
Five years, from Software Engineer II to Senior Engineering Manager. I ran the platform teams across four countries, built the event-driven integration platform, and took electronic prior authorization live at 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, and around it I fit in a co-op at American Axle writing plant floor traceability in C#, a TechLab at Mcity project that paired me with Tome to build an IoT pedestrian classifier, a stretch at the Office of Academic Innovation, Dawn White’s faculty-sponsored startup Perisense, a healthcare analytics internship at Improvement Path Systems, the Michigan club baseball team, and the Chi Psi and Theta Xi fraternities.
The first job, Dunkin’ Donuts
Opened on weekends in Bloomfield Hills, and Sundays were insane. Closed on weeknights after baseball and football practice. This is where the coffee habit started, and everything I've done since runs on it.