Hi, I’m Jason (he/him). I also go by Baker from the many years I spent working on a team with multiple Jasons, and here on the interwebs I often go by my initials (jehb).
My technical journey started when I was about thirteen, learning HTML back in the days when layouts were mostly done with <table> and <iframe> tags to create fan websites for some of the games I loved, and started programming with QBasic and Turbo Pascal back in the good old days of DOS. While a lot of my friends were playing video games, I was the kid who who toiled away with a hex editor to make mods and conversions for them, and even took a swing at writing my own level editors—my high school senior project on medieval architecture was built on a custom Quake level I designed myself.
Education and Professional Work
In college at UNC Chapel Hill, I wanted to do everything. I started in computer science before switching majors a few times and eventually landing on political science, and adopting minors in city planning and environmental science along the way. One of the highlights of my time in undergrad was getting to spend a research semester at the Highlands Biological Station studying landscape ecology and the local flora and fauna, including a capstone project on Hemlock canopy dynamics, and an internship with a local land trust working on sediment monitoring following a dam breach.
After school, my career pivoted between technology and advocacy, often sitting somewhere at the intersection, but always focused on trying to make the world a better place for ourselves and those we share it with.
I started my first job after college working for my local food co-op, Weaver Street Market, where I managed events, community education, outreach, and membership. It was a great way to start a professional journey, learning a lot about marketing and cooperative business structure, serving as executive secretary to our board of directors, and liaison to a number of community groups. I was even elected chair of the downtown merchant’s association in one of towns we served. I also started a lot of their digital marketing efforts, including creating and managing their first social media accounts and completing a redesign and port to WordPress of their restaurant website.
After a few years, I took a turn and went back to school at NC State University for GIS at the Center for Geospatial Analytics, first a graduate certificate and then a master’s degree. This kickstarted my move into tech, with classes on web development, database design, python programming, data analysis, and mobile application development. I also got to help teach a course called Advanced Geospatial Analytics for three terms, which really helped me realize how much I enjoyed helping other people to be successful with the technology they use in their careers. For my master’s project, I built a demo trail issue reporting application for the Triangle Land Conservancy.
I actually only ever used my GIS degree for volunteer and a little consulting work. When I graduated, I spent about a year using my newly minted technical skills not in GIS, but applying them to a small web development agency I started with a friend. I did a lot of WordPress and Drupal development, working mostly on political and not-for-profit websites, before joining Red Hat at the end of the year to support their community programs.
Working at Red Hat was truly one of the highlights of my career. I spent the majority of the time helping to manage a large community publication, Opensource.com, where I was able to shine light on all things open source and where it intersects with law, health care, government, hardware, science, and just about everything else under the sun to millions of monthly readers. I then helped launch and managed the team who ran Enable Sysadmin, another community site dedicated to publishing free technical content for systems administrators that became the largest subsection of www.redhat.com. Eventually, I took on technical leadership of the entire community site ecosystem, managing our entire stack from top to bottom. While sadly the sites were discontinued a few years after IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, almost all of my work there was created under open source or Creative Commons licenses and much of it can now be found here or elsewhere on the web.
In 2022, I left to join a small group of other ex-Red Hatters at company called Appian working in the low-code process automation space. What drew me there was the premise of empowering teams to take control of their own business logic without having to rely on central IT for everything. I managed a small team of technical and operations specialists, and tried to be the “glue” to keep all of our many systems happy and talking to one another.
After leaving Appian at the end of 2024, I decided to take a little break and return to consulting which gave me the flexibility I needed to, among other things, help care for an aging family member. While I’m not currently looking for full-time work, I am open to part-time and contract work, particularly with mission-driven organizations.
Volunteering
Aside from my professional work, I’ve also really enjoyed the many opportunities I’ve had to give back as a volunteer. I stayed in Chapel Hill after graduation and served on numerous local advisory groups, including the town’s Transportation and Planning Boards and the committee that kicked off the rewrite of the town’s Comprehensive Plan, as well as county and regional boards including GoTriangle’s transit advisory committee. I’m particularly interested in shaping land use and transportation planning decisions to play a role in combating climate change and promoting social mobility.
I’ve also volunteered quite a bit in the nonprofit space, including spending nearly a decade serving as political chair and on the executive committee of our local Sierra Club group, co-chaired the committee that successfully passed a county-wide bond referendum for transit funding, and was a founding board member of NEXT, an organization providing public education and advocacy around smart growth. Since my college days, I’ve advocated for progressive policies locally, and spent many years as an editorial board member of OrangePolitics.org, an award-winning local site dedicated to raising public awareness of progressive policies and politics in our area.
Personal Interests
It probably won’t surprise you to learn I have some nerdy hobbies. I like playing with microelectronic circuits including the Arduino and Raspberry Pi, along with some other boards. I put together a Prusa MK3 3D printer which I mostly use for shop projects, but occasionally will print a fun little trinket. My laser etcher is another self-built open hardware project called the Engravinator, and I’ve got a large scale CNC I’m in the process of assembling. Aside from fabrication, I also run a modest home computing lab, mostly powering our home automation and media center, but I seem to grow the number of self-hosted applications I manage every week without really meaning to.
I do have a number of non-technical hobbies as well. I’m an intermediate woodworker, enjoy gardening and native landscaping, and I’ve hiked most of the trails around my small corner of the world. I play guitar very badly but still enjoy it. And apparently I like the frustration of working with very small finicky things even when they are not electronic, including assembling model kits and origami/kusudama.
My main hobby these days seems to be renovating our house, a 1960s bungalow with a walk out basement, and the acre of property with various outbuildings that came with it. We moved during the pandemic, and I didn’t know quite what I was getting into when I took this project on, but it’s at least occasionally fun between frustrating discoveries of new things that need to be repaired.