It's amazing what a little prod from someone else can get you to do, like me actually starting a blog. Now you are asking "but who are you?"
Who is Jason?
Well I'm Jason, or at least 'a' Jason (get the joke in my blog name?). If I were to describe myself I could say that I'm a middle aged white man who was born in the United States, and then found himself far away from his land of birth and now lives in Germany. I could also say that I'm a software developer, but that's all a bit boring. So instead I'd like to tell it in a story.
My name is Jason Reed, and I am a father, husband, and software developer and I try to fulfill those roles in exactly that order. I am the father of three amazing children who are not only intelligent and talented, but also have the uncanny knack to help my hair turn grey. I'm married to the most loving and caring woman that exists, she is a professional midwife which was something I didn't know existed until I met her. Together we live in Germany which was decided when my wife (girlfriend at the time) informed me that moving to the US was off the table.
"How did you get all the way to Germany", I hear you ask. Well that's quite simple, I joined the United States Army in the autumn of 1994. I had already trained and worked as an electronics technician for several years. The job was fine, but the Army promised me a chance to travel, and boy did they not lie about that. Thankfully I never deployed to a combat zone, but I did take part in the mission to Bosnia/Herzegovina as a member of IFOR in 1996. While in the Army I worked as a "Network Switching Systems Operator/Maintainer" which is a long term for someone who sits in a metal box, and configures a large ISDN telephone switch and related network (old fashioned Packet Switch) systems. I left the Army December 2001, and signed into Germany as a civilian in January 2002.
I was fortunate to already have a job lined up when I left the Army with a small company that builds communications systems for ships. I worked first as a technical trainer teaching the customers how to use their systems. Then later I moved into system integration, and finally into software development. Working for this company had me travelling a lot, which was at first fun, but with young children at home, it eventually became tedious. I worked for this company from 2002 until 2016. I then moved to an even smaller company which was closer to home, and business travel was more a matter of a day or two and not months at a time. My current company has a software for document design, kind of a template system for business documents. In this case it is focused mostly on the generation of digital documents. My experience, has raised me to the level of senior developer, and team leader.
If you are curious about my world view (especially with all the insanity coming from the United States lately), I am certainly more left leaning than people in the United States. For example in 2019 we gave up our car. I still have a driver's license, but we pretty much bike everywhere local in our town, or use mass transit for longer distances. I found that I enjoy this. Travelling by train is very relaxing, because I don't have to hassle with the other drivers on the road. I can spend that time reading, or playing Sudoku. I've also started listening to a podcast, which I may discuss in a later post. In anycase I've kind of fallen for the whole, no car thing. I'll certainly be posting about that in the future.
So besides riding my bike everywhere, playing sudoku and listening to podcasts, what else do I do for fun? I enjoy painting. This is a hobby that I came into later in life but I really enjoy it. I'm not really good at it but it does give me a chance to disconnect from the world. If you are curious as to my art I post them at times on Mastodon, or Pixelfed, and occasionally on Instagram.
What's this blog thing about?
So now that you know a bit about me, you are probably wondering what I'm going to post on this blog, and to tell you the truth, I have no idea. It's one of the reasons I chose to name it "Thoughts from a Jason", because it will likely be me rambling on about some topic that is currently in my head that I need to get out so that I can sleep or move on to more important thoughts. You have been warned. I will at least attempt to organize them with tags, which I'm still learning about with the software I'm using to generate this site.
What software are you using?
So to help kickstart this whole blog thing it was suggested that I try out 11ty. The @11ty/eleventy project is a node.js application that you can simply install. I'll not go too deeply into my thoughts on this software, as I'm still in the early stages and have not found all the ins-and-outs. Needless to say it was pretty simple to setup and within a couple of afternoons of fiddling around and trying things, looking a the tutorials I've been abel to generate something that I don't think looks like complete trash, and I was able to implement my entire website design into the project. Eventually I'll likely write up a post on my thoughts for everyone to read.
What are your goals for the blog?
Simply put, my goal is to work on my communication skills. I feel as someone who is in a senior role in any job, you need to have strong communications skills. This means the ability to write and make what you want to say clear and understandable. So to that end, I'm going to attempt to post once a week. The topics will very, the important thing is that I'm writing and improving my writing.
So until next post, take care.
Jason