Daniel Jalkut
Founder at redsweater
Arlington, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarDaniel Jalkut is a founder and seasoned software engineer with 16 years of experience building macOS and iOS applications and developer tools from Arlington, MA. He leads Red Sweater and contributes deep, practical expertise to prominent open-source projects—most notably the macOS/iOS RSS reader NetNewsWire and the Sparkle software update framework—where he focuses on reliability, security, and cross-version compatibility. His contributions span front-end and back-end work, from Swift command-line utilities and keychain-backed downloaders to JavaScript editor fixes and WordPress REST API permission hardening. Known among peers as a pragmatic problem-solver (and self-described "punkass of lore"), he excels at refactoring legacy codepaths and squashing subtle bugs that affect real users. Equally comfortable at the system level and in user-facing UI improvements, he brings entrepreneurial judgment to engineering tradeoffs and long-term maintainability.
16 years of coding experience
Spanish
Stackoverflow
17,577reputation
551kreached
54answers
8questions
cocoa-touch
top-5%
macos
top-5%
nsarray
top-1%
objective-c
top-1%
iphone
top-5%
cocoa
top-5%
Github Skills (42)
application-framework10
objective-c10
contenteditable10
javascript10
ios10
text-editor10
scripting10
testing10
wordpress10
app-framework10
software-update10
html-editor10
ckeditor10
editor10
xcode10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
ohoachuck/wwdc-downloader
Nov 2013 - Jun 2019
WWDC 2019 video downloader script written in Swift - no external dependency.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 5 PRs, 1 comment in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Daniel contributed significantly to a Swift-based script for downloading WWDC videos. Their work included implementing features to save and retrieve credentials using the system keychain, merging branches, and adapting the script for different years and resource types. They also added command-line options and optimized file handling. Finally, they fixed and maintained scripts used to fetch sample code downloads.
swift
sparkle-project/Sparkle
Jun 2010 - Sep 2021
A software update framework for macOS
Role in this project:Software Engineer
Software EngineerContributions:37 commits, 21 PRs, 31 comments in 11 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily contributed to the Sparkle framework for macOS, focusing on bug fixes and code improvements. Their work involved resolving memory leaks in the `SUAppcastItem`, addressing a potential security vulnerability related to the `finish_installation.app` copy process, and fixing compiler warnings related to code signing and type casting. They also improved the UI and string handling for update alerts, and refactored installer logic, demonstrating a solid understanding of the project's inner workings.
macossoftware-updateupdateframework
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