Taaniel Jakobson

Background

About Taaniel Jakobson

I've been obsessed with computer systems since I was 8, after high school I took a brief 11-year detour through bacterial genomes, and somehow ended up back where I started. During those 11-years in bioinformatics, I spent most of my time wrangling small fussy nano-computers (bacteria) and trying to figure out how can a little monster grow so ridiculously fast, or why another one doesn't want to grow at all (you know who you are.). I managed research projects for international partners, dealt with big data in tiny universes, and learned that in the end biology is just really complicated chemistry running on really tiny computers. After 11 years of piecing together billion-piece puzzles with 80% of the pieces missing, I remembered why I loved computers in the first place: figuring out how every part of the system works, and how to make it work better, whether it's a bacterial cell or a data pipeline. Biology taught me to handle messy, complex systems where you're always working with partial information. These days I build data pipelines that are thankfully simpler than metabolism. I still work with big data, but now it's about humans clicking buttons instead of proteins folding. Building an event-driven pipeline feels like I get to design the metabolism, except I actually know all the inputs and outputs, can see the whole system, and no one mutates when I'm not looking. I work with Python, Kafka, Airflow, Docker, can handle CI/CD, and I'm not afraid of Kubernetes or whatever data platform is the flavor of the day. I've built things in GCP, AWS, and Azure - apparently I collect cloud platforms. Still a scientist at heart, after spending years reverse-engineering billion-year-old biological systems, learning new tools in an ever-evolving world feels refreshingly straightforward. I run marathons for fun and maintain a homelab (the server kind) in my spare time, because apparently optimizing one thing leads to optimizing everything in life.