About Me
It might not be everything you want to know!
About Me
I’m Jason, a CTO and VP of Software Engineering at a major enterprise software company, father of three, a good husband (so my wife says), and an all-around good guy. 2024 marks my 30th year in the software industry. It has been a wild ride. After years of considering creating a place where I can share all that I have learned, I have finally decided that it would be fun to share the lessons, stories, failures, and minutia of a long and entertaining career. The content here is my own as well as my sometimes-pointed opinions and is not in any way associated with my current or any of my past employers. I also reserve the right to change anything I like, anytime I want, for good or even pointless reasons.
So, let me tell you a little about myself. I love to code and have all my life. My Mom is the one who taught me how to code, having learned herself in the 1960s. Fortran 4 was my first computer language, and I used it to code a baseball game on a PDP-11 at the local community college at the age of 5. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 which I spent countless hours playing with while learning 6502 assembly. For those that remember, the VIC-20 only had 4k of RAM, and I didn’t have the money to buy a RAM expander. So, to do primitive word processing, I had to write a memory swap to my cassette drive.
I’ve been in core software engineering, support, services, strategy and leadership during my lengthy career. I was fortunate enough to do so while living around the world in China, Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, and many States in the USA. I have been recognized as an IBM Distinguished Engineer along with many industry lauds for being innovative, passionate, flexible, and perhaps crazy enough to take on just about any challenge.
As I write more here in my new destination, I’m sure you, the reader, will learn more about me, but at my core, I like improving, learning, helping others improve, and being the best I possibly can be each and every day. A young Winston Churchill, on his first speaking engagement to the United States after his involvement in the Boer War, met an aging but resplendent Mark Twain in New York. After the speech, Winston asked Twain to sign his collection of books for him. Twain added the following to his signature, “To do good is noble; to teach others to do good is nobler, and no trouble.” This quote is something I remind myself of each and every day.