Jake Roggenbuck
SWE Intern @ Capital One & CS @ UC Davis
Quick Links: #
Favorite languages: C, Rust, Go, C++, Python, TypeScript
Topics of interest: Math, Space, Computer Science, Machine Learning
Projects: Regolith, Kronicler, RedoxQL, AlgoBoard, Auto Clock Speed.
Highlighted posts: Optimizing Course Search by over 8x, Backend SQL Injection Research.
Overview #
I’m currently conducting research in programming languages and security at Prof. Stanford’s Davis PL Lab, as well as research in database systems. Notable projects for both include Regolith, a secure Regex library for JavaScript, and RedoxQL, a database that won first place in UC Davis’ database competition. My research with Regex led me to present a poster about linear-time regex engines. My Regex project Regolith recently appeared on the front page of Hacker News, receiving attention from the community.
Notable hackathon wins include Hack Davis, UC Davis’ annual hackathon, YC Agent Mail hackathon, receiving over $5k in awards, 1st place in climate pitch competition, Vibe Code by Transpose Platform receiving over $400 in awards, and placed 3rd for ProductCon 2025.
I also maintain a few libraries in Rust, Python, and JavaScript totaling over 170k downloads across the three languages. Those include auto-clock-speed, efcl, kronicler, regolith, and statistical-tests-rs. View these packages on my crates.io, pypi.org, and npmjs.
I’m passionate about building useful products which led me to found and scale a club search product to 10k students and a course recommendation product to 20k students. The latter handling over 1 million endpoint visits over tens of thousands of sessions from users.
The best way to view my work is on my GitHub and this website.
Current Research: #
I’m currently conducting programming language research. Broadly programming language research focuses on security and safety of how programming languages are designed and implemented, as well as theoretical ideas that can be applied to change what traits languages can guarantee.
Recently, my research involves testing and improving regular expression libraries. My initial investigation into RegEx runtime resulted in a poster submission to the Undergraduate Research Conference at UC Davis.
Later work includes Regolith, which protects JavaScript and TypeScript backend applications from catastrophic backtracking by wrapping Rust’s linear time engine as a JavaScript package. This project landed on the front page of Y Combinator’s Hacker News.
A server-side TypeScript and JavaScript library immune to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) attacks by using Rust and linear RegEx under the hood. Regolith has a linear worst case time complexity, compared to the default RegExp found in TypeScript and JavaScript, which has an exponential worst case.
Database Systems: #
One of my many interests includes creating database systems. My prior fascination with optimization was ignited when I took ECS 165A at UC Davis. My team’s database called RedoxQL placed first for one of the milestones based on performance. The technical write-up in the README explains how we eked out every bit of performance we could using flamegraphs, benchmarks, compiler settings, and performant data structures (Like B-Trees).
🦀 RedoxQL is an L-Store database written in Rust and Python 🚀 and 🥇 Fastest database speed in the class for milestone 2 (ECS165A Winter 2025) ⚡
Since then, I’ve created Kronicler which allows you to efficiently capture performance metrics for product systems. I created my own database to ensure it would be fast based on problem-specific constraints like logs being append only, making my database extremely fast for this specific use case. You can start using Kronicler at usekronicler.com for performance metrics, or you could use the fast database implementation for similar problems by importing the library and manually capturing data as explained in the README.
Automatic performance capture and analysis for production applications in Python using a custom columnar database written in Rust.
Recently, I started reading Database Internals by Alex Petrov. I highly recommend this book for learning more about building databases.
Notable Projects: #
AlgoBoard.org #
Algo Board is a website to promote friendly competition for solving algorithmic coding problems. Algo Board lets you host weekly / monthly competitions for your friends, clubs, and other organizations.
🏆 Algo Board is a website to promote friendly competition for solving algorithmic coding problems. Algo Board lets you host weekly / monthly competitions for your fiends, clubs, and other organizations.
AlgoBoard and the weekly competitions I ran, greatly helped me prepare for technical interviews.
Auto Clock Speed #
A utility to check stats about your CPU, and auto regulate clock speeds to help with either performance or battery life.
A utility to check stats about your CPU, and auto regulate clock speeds to help with either performance or battery life.
Auto Clock Speed now has over 13 thousand downloads on crates.io.
Component #
A programming language that compiles to x86-64 assembly for math using postfix notation
A programming language that compiles to x86-64 assembly. Component uses postfix notation, is written in Rust, and is intended to be used for math computation.
JAI #
This was an entry to a “Lang Jam” where I had only a few days to make an entire interpreter. These were the types of programming languages that led me to programming language research.
Jai is a programming language
Previous Research #
Math Research - T3 #
Before college, I was involved in two different research projects. This first was a math paper I wrote with my friends Adam and Henry.
Abstract: “We investigate some interesting properties of the sequence made up of every third term of the Thue-Morse sequence, and consider other similar sequences.”
The full paper and code example can be found on the GitHub project.
We investigate some interesting properties of the sequence made up of every third term of the Thue-Morse sequence, and consider other similar sequences.
Bio Research - TMBL #
I was also involved with research in Topological Molecular Biology where I wrote logistic regression code.
Recent Projects #
More Projects #
Open Source #
I also contribute to open source, most notably: #
onlook-dev/onlook (YC W25), pretzelai/pretzelai (YC W24), microsoft/RD-Agent, rocky-linux/rocky, rust-lang/miri, grafana/pyroscope, fastly/fastly-py, pathwaycom/pathway, argosopentech/argos-translate, python-mechanize/mechanize, and more
Contact #
Email: me@jr0.org - Bug Reports: bug@jr0.org - Public GPG Key: 309BBC9