Welcome to my site! I am Jason, a Sr. Customer Engineer specializing in App Modernization at Google Cloud. What does that mean? Well, I help Enterprises become cloud/digital native. My second language is YAML as I use Kubernetes a lot. My primary technological passion is for Serverless Containers and Serverless Eventing.
Diversity, Equality, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEI-B) is very important to me. I fully believe that the only way we can be a great society is for us to educate ourselves on the discrimination that occurs in society and work to address it. As a mixed race individual (Black and White) myself, identity and discrimination isn’t a new concept to me. I am the founder and former global chair of Mixed Googlers. It is one of the first ERGs in the Fortune 100 dedicated to Multi-racial and Multi-ethnic individuals, their friends, their family, and their allies.
I am a world traveler who was a digital nomad for about a year and a half, traveling throughout the USA and APAC region. If I could chill anywhere in the world, it’d probably be Japan, Taiwan, or New Zealand.
San Antonio, Texas is my hometown where I ultimately started my career in tech. Next, I moved to Austin where I ate BBQ and grew my tech skills. Now I am in the next chapter of my life in San Francisco. Throughout my career I have been a tech entrepreneur, an Operations Monitor, a Support Engineer, a Developer Advocate, and a Customer (Sales) Engineer.
Starting in 2022, I started investing in startups as an angel investor. Most all of my investments are through the Black Angel Group but I have also invested via Gaingels in the past. Only 1% of all Venture Capital (VC) goes to Black founders and less than 1% of all VC dollars are managed by black people so I am hoping to make a difference in this area where I can. I am still very new to this so we’ll see what the future holds.
I am also a HUGE open source advocate. I was using Ubuntu back in the 04.10 days and was advocating industries adopting open source solutions over the traditional ones. Apache, Nagios, Asterisk, MySQL, Linux, you name it. Today I continue to contribute to the CNCF, CD Foundation, Linux Foundation, Knative and the Python Software Foundation
Please stay in contact by checking my social media at the top or emailing me. howdy(at)jasonsmith.io