// /about

~jason

I'm Jason. I live in Hopkinsville, Kentucky — a small town in the western end of the state — with my wife, my daughter, two big dogs, and one cat I am only recently and reluctantly admitting to liking.

I was born in 1987, which means I grew up watching a VHS copy of Blade Runner with my childhood best friend long before I had any business doing so, and the synth-and-neon visual language of that era still gets me every time. I am a fully-loaded Apple fan in the way that everyone with my exact upbringing eventually became. I make no apologies.

What I do for work

I graduated from Christian County High School in 2005. The story starts at Walmart — fresh out of high school, working the meat department, trying to figure out where life was going to take me. A girl in the produce department wandered over one day with a question: "My boyfriend runs an IT place that does websites and stuff. You kind of seem like a nerd — want me to see if they're hiring?" An interview later, I was in.

I got lucky. My manager at Ecommerce Inc was great and willing to teach a kid the ropes. Somewhere along the way, if you called IXwebhosting in the late 2000s, you may have spoken with me. Almost four years later, Ecommerce outgrew Hopkinsville and moved out of state, which left me wondering what was next.

A couple of interviews later I landed at Stylenet in Nashville. I figured I could make the commute — remote work was technically possible back then, but nothing like it is today. After about a year the buddy I was carpooling with found a job closer to home, and doing the drive alone got to be too much. So Stylenet and I parted ways and I moved on to a medical-records clerk position at Fort Campbell.

I'm not going to lie — that job was boring. It was basically moving data by hand from one system into another, and I started thinking about how a real automation tool could replace most of it. I sketched the idea on my own time and watched myself wish it existed. If I could imagine the workflow with the tools I had, surely a real dev higher up the project could build it. The writing was on the wall. That's when the real story started.

I got a random call from a headhunter — a 95-year-old company in town was looking for an IT guy. Three interviews and a month later I sat down at a new desk at Cayce Mill Supply… and immediately realized I knew nothing. One of my first tasks was to reinstall Windows on a PC and join it to the domain. I'd installed Windows plenty of times, no problem — so I muddled my way through and got it deployed. Next up was learning the ERP. That thing was a beast, and I'm not going to lie, it still is — so many moving parts and so many customizations bolted on over the years that I'm not 100% sure what vanilla looks like anymore. After that, SQL — and on day one I'd never run a query in my life. I knew it was a database, but outside of limited use at Ecommerce I'd never pulled data out of one.

Cayce Mill has grown into a mid-sized distribution company that's expanded into several new locations since I joined, and I co-manage IT and infrastructure with one teammate — also a mentor and a friend — and have for thirteen years. The boring half of that is keeping the directory, the databases, the mail platform, the network, and a small fleet of macOS / Windows / Linux endpoints running smoothly across multiple sites. The interesting half is that, somewhere along the way, I started writing software.

Today the goal is to make the day-to-day as easy as possible for everyone else while keeping the company's gears greased. The result is a small platoon of Go applications I built — about thirty of them. An internal IT-ops dashboard. Multiple production Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for our LLM tooling. Onboarding/offboarding automation. PhishGuard, an in-house anti-phishing classifier that quietly catches what the commercial gateway misses. A custom deployment tool that fits our weird hybrid infrastructure. None of it was assigned. I noticed problems and shipped solutions before they became tickets, and the company let me keep doing that.

The Sunday gig

Around the same time I started at Cayce Mill, I picked up a side gig at First United Methodist Church in Hopkinsville. My girlfriend (now my wife) and I were walking out of a service when one of the preachers stopped me: "You're kind of nerdy and work on computers, right? We need someone to run the sound board at the contemporary service." She explained there was a band, praise songs, the usual setup. I had no idea how to do that, but it was a paying gig and only about three hours a week, so I said yes.

I showed up on the first Sunday with no idea what was happening. Someone showed me how to turn the board on. I figured the rest out from there. I was running both the sound and the slides — ProPresenter for the lyrics — and I'm not going to lie, it was harder than my day job at the time. The first few months were chaotic; we didn't have much organization or structure.

Then a new worship leader came on, and the guy was the real deal. He knew sound, knew ProPresenter, played guitar like I'd never heard before, and could actually sing. Suddenly we were playing fresh songs, the service had shape, and I started to learn what all those little knobs on the board actually did.

A couple of years later the church made a big investment in updating the sound and lighting, and the contemporary service moved from the multipurpose gym into the sanctuary. That's when it really took off. Today I run a Soundcraft Si Performer 3, mix it from an iPad, and we live-stream every service to Facebook and YouTube. We've got a dedicated camera tech, a dedicated ProPresenter operator, and automated lighting cues — which means I finally get to focus on mixing.

I've come a long way over thirteen years. I still have plenty to learn.

Styx Vanguard

On the side I run Styx Vanguard, a one-person web design and development practice for local KY businesses. The whole thing — the CRM, the design pipeline, the demo builder, the deployment tooling — is Go I wrote, augmented with local AI inference running on a homelab GPU. I built it because I wanted to prove to myself I could ship a real product end to end without anyone else's opinions in the loop. It worked. And it's cool.

What I care about

I care a lot about helping non-technical people stay safe online. I am the friend who reminds you to run updates, turn on 2FA, and stop reusing the same password since 2009. I have set up password managers for more family members than I can count and I am not even slightly tired of doing it. The internet is a hostile place for people who didn't grow up on it, and a small amount of help goes very far.

I'm a proud Methodist, and I also love hearing what other people believe. There's room for all of us on this big space rock.

I also care about software that respects its users — fast, scriptable, owned by you, stays out of your way. That's why my homelab keeps growing and the SaaS bills keep shrinking.

Outside of a screen

Music — please don't shuffle my library

My rotation is metal, then praise music, then 90s hip-hop, then 90s country, then EDM, then back around. It depends entirely on the mood. It is not algorithmically explainable. Spotify gave up trying to recommend things to me a long time ago. Here's the actual rotation, mood by mood.

If any of this sounds like someone you'd want to talk to, the contact page is right there.