Jack Ver Straate

Personal Website

About Me

Hello! I'm Jack, a software engineer at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I'm on track to graduate with a B.S. in Computer Science in May 2026, and I'm pursuing an M.S. through UNC Charlotte's Early Entry program, with expected completion in Spring 2027.

I'm drawn to software because I love solving problems. There's nothing like a JavaScript function finally behaving, or an error finally yielding to a debugging in C. Time flies when I'm programming. I easily get lost in the flow of prototyping and testing until the system clicks.

You can find me on LinkedIn, GitHub, and Letterboxd if you like movies!

Headshot of Jack Ver Straate

Background

  • Born in Denver, Colorado (2004); moved to Charlotte, North Carolina in 2015.
  • Began writing software in 2021 and started studying computer science in 2023.

Interests

  • macOS/Unix: I love the Unix philosophy and macOS stability building efficient, scriptable workflows from the command line.
  • Minimalism: I prefer purposeful tools and clean interfaces, focusing on clarity, performance, and removing distractions.
  • Sim Racing: I enjoy the blend of engineering and skill, tuning setups and racecraft while chasing consistent lap times.

Projects

Personal Website

This website. Built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and hosted on an Apache2 web server. Built to learn about the fundamentals of web development, but also as a place that I control and can share my projects and passions.

Alfred Email Generator

An Alfred workflow that generates catch-all email addresses for your own domain. Built for my own personal use and to teach myself how to use functions and concatenation in Python.