Jason

Role Model

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 09:03:00 -0400

A career knowledge base that builds tailored resumes where every bullet traces back to its source.

Budgeteer

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 09:02:00 -0400

A shared envelope-budgeting app for two people who just want to know where the money goes.

dedupe

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 09:01:00 -0400

A Go CLI that organized and deduplicated 20+ years of family photos and videos.

Void Linux on NanoPI NEO3

Thu, 28 May 2026 17:57:24 -0400

NanoPI NEO3 +Void == ??

A couple of years ago, I started playing around with the idea of a little homelab for tinkering with various applications. I started very small with a single Raspberry Pi 4 and an external SSD, and expanded slowly from there. Along the way, I found myself in possession of 4 NanoPi NEO3 single board computers. I got mine from Amazon, and they are actually manufactured by Youyeetoo, not FriendlyElec, but they are the same boards. I initially set them up as a little Docker Swarm cluster, then a microK8s Kubernetes cluster. I never really used them much for that, and they kind of sat for a long time powered down, waiting for me to get interested again.

Oops! All Ragtime!

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 20:45:47 -0400

I built RAG in plain SQL before I knew the term existed. Why structured retrieval beat embeddings for my resume data, and where vectors still fit.

Screen Test

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:06:29 -0400

When is a screen a test? Every time, if your interviewer is good at their job.

I was reminded of this recently, when I had a first interview with a company I hadn’t spoken with before. Going into this first round, I did the exact thing you should never do when facing the unknown. I made assumptions about the interview based on prior interviews that I had been through. The first screen is never terribly technical, right?

How Your Resume Lies While Telling the Truth

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:15:59 -0400

LLMs rarely invent your experience. They inflate it one plausible word at a time, until "contributed to" quietly becomes "led."

Stop Lying to Yourself (and Others)

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:47:43 -0400

The lying resumes had to stop. After enough customizations for enough job descriptions, my resume had started to look like a copy of a copy of a copy: roughly the right overall shape, but not quite recognizable as the same document.

As I’ve been seeking a new job opportunity this time around, I’ve been trying to be selective about where I apply, but also to tailor the resume I submit to highlight how I fit the specifics of each job description. To avoid pulling my hair out, I have also started to rely on an LLM to help. The output typically meets my standards, but one major issue that I’ve started to notice is that my repeated modifications had started to introduce a lot of drift from ground truth and had lost the plot. For example, one position working with a large international bank customer had somewhere picked up the location of Toronto, Ontario. I’ve been to Toronto exactly once, and I never left the airport.

Lets Go, or A Life-Long Love of Language

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 08:23:43 -0400

“Let’s Go!” — Or, a Life-Long Love of Language

I have a collector’s mentality. If it comes in different colors, shapes, or styles, my natural inclination is to own one of each. In a lot of ways, it is about aesthetic beauty. I’ve collected Magic: the Gathering cards with their beautiful art, old Disston handsaws with their stunning etches and hand carved apple handles, and a lot of other things of beauty in my life. The one collection that seems to be consistent, though, is programming languages. It started early on, in my freshman year of college, and still affects my day-to-day relationship with software development. It might be hard to see how that relates to the other stuff, but to me the patterns and shapes of the written code carry their own unique loveliness that is kind of unique in the world.

Is It Too Late for This?

Thu, 28 May 2026 09:53:13 -0400

Decades in the industry and no portfolio to show for it. Why I'm starting one anyway, and a plan for anyone who thinks they've missed the window.

Resume

Sun, 24 May 2026 12:44:38 -0400

Right Now

Wed, 20 May 2026 18:31:20 -0400

What I'm working on, building, and thinking about at the moment.

About

Wed, 20 May 2026 18:00:17 -0400

I like to build things. Actually, lots of things. Sometimes physical things in wood, and sometimes digital things in code.