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. There are still a lot of people who don’t fully get the cloud so I do my part to help. My primary technological passion is around Containers, Serverless Technologies and Serverless Eventing.
Technology has always been a part of my persona. Part of my passion is not just creating tech but also explaining tech to people. I love to see that “ah-hah!” moment from people and just helping them achieve their goals.
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,Linux Foundation, Knative and the Python Software Foundation. I am also a co-lead for the Cloud Native San Francisco Community
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. I live by the “Bill and Ted” rule. I believe that if we could all “be excellent to each other” the world would be a better place. I also regularly advocate for improved access to mental health and am an active volunteer at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s San Francisco Bay Area Chapter.
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, New Zealand and Taiwan. It is very fun to go around the world and checking out museums, learning about the history and culture, and eat amazing food.
San Antonio, Texas is my hometown where I ultimately started my career in tech. Next, I moved to Austin where I ate BBQ, paddle boarded at Town Lake, 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 data center operations monitor, an advanced support engineer, a developer advocate, and a Customer 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 (as an ally) a few times. 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.
Please stay in contact by checking my social media at the top or emailing me. howdy(at)jasonsmith.io