I’m Jason — but my friends call me Json. I’ve been writing code for more than thirty years – long enough to have survived Flash, SOAP, and two separate “serverless revolutions” – and writing about code for the last ten. I build things, break things, and write about the mess — mostly automation tools, orchestration frameworks, and the weird little systems that keep the modern internet from catching fire (most days).
I love code. Not the polished “look how elegant my repo is” kind — the gritty, late-night, bug-haunted kind that actually runs in production. There’s nothing better than watching a clean deployment log scroll by after a full day of wrestling YAML. I write about real tools — Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, dbt, Fivetran, Kafka, Huginn, Pipedream — not as shiny buzzwords, but as the duct tape and plumbing they really are. Data Automation Tools, is where I dump that award-winning, oscar-nominated mix of technical honesty, snark, and hard-knocks wisdom. Something along the lines of developer documentation meets bar-stool confession.
If you run into me at a conference, I’ll be the one nursing a brewsky at the edge of the room while someone on stage uses “onboarding” unironically. I’ve written some of my best code three IPAs deep with a half-finished README and Slayer playing in the background. My idea of “team building” is merging someone’s PR before they finish testing it — mostly to see if they’re paying attention. I’m allergic to corporate tradecraft: beauracracies gives me hives – and meetings give me a vertiginous feeling of despair (especially meetings with 12-steps).
As if that didn’t make me charming enough, I should confess now that social nuance isn’t exactly my strong suit, but I’m trying. I’ve made peace with the fact that tact is a skill best left to product managers. Beneath the sarcasm, though, I care deeply about clean architecture, honest communication, and helping developers survive the data-stack circus. My writing comes from years of building pipelines that worked beautifully right up until they didn’t — and then figuring out why until 3 a.m.
In sum: I’m Json. I write, I code, I automate the boring stuff. If you like your tech commentary served with vulgarity, pragmatism, a dash of developer therapy, and a splash of warm beer, then grab a coldie from the cooler, pull up a terminal, and join me. I love company. No(t) really.