Who is JasonTrue

I’m Jason Truesdell, an Elixir nerd, a Seattleite, and now a resident of Kawasaki, Japan.

I’ve been writing code in one form or another since I was an 8 year old kid with a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer. I carefully avoided formally studying anything to do with computer science in college, though I sometimes helped friends with computer science homework and spent way too much time online (Bitnet, then the Internet), hosting radio shows on campus radio, and producing a music video show and news graphics for the campus TV station, and even a brief stint as an assistant editor at a community newspaper. I went on an exchange program to Germany, where I spent a lot of time cooking, studying Japanese, and learning about HTML and other internet technologies.

Somehow, I graduated with an East Asian Studies degree in 1996.

This terribly esoteric combination of activities led to my first “real” job at Microsoft in 1997, testing German and Japanese versions of Internet Explorer 4.0 for internationalization.

Fast forward to many years later, and I’m a software developer and, manager of teams, and sometimes “executive director” when the situation demands it. You can hire me. Send me a message.

What I dig

Not all of these things are requirements, they just make me happier.

  • Staffing up and building software teams (engineering, program management, UX, marketing)
  • Working directly with customers.
  • Teasing out a testable domain layer over time, building a common vocabulary between business and technical teams (Domain Driven Design)
  • Solutions engineering, at least when I understand the domain and product well.
  • Pairing, but not necessarily religiously.
  • Untangling ORM and database performance problems (including ActiveRecord, nHibernate, Hibernate).
  • Helping less senior engineers become better than I am.
  • Hybrid functional languages. Elixir, F#, OCaml, Scala, etc.
  • Expressive object-oriented languages like Ruby, C#.
  • Vue.js. LiveView.
  • Membrane Framework
  • Nerves
  • Internationalization and localizability.
  • Making teams better.
  • Designing for emergent application architecture.
  • Developing user personas and defining user stories based on their needs.
  • Documenting system design and APIs. Writing onboarding guides.
  • Elasticsearch is fun.
  • Integrations with 3rd party services like Stripe.

Other things I can do

  • Javascript
  • Java
  • CSS
  • Legacy application improvements
  • Navigate Amazon Web Services (mainly EC2, Cloudfront, S3, Route53, ECR, EFS) but probably whatever else you need too
  • Docker, Docker Swarm

Where else am I

My code

Public repositories I’ve contributed to