Who I Am

Hi, I'm Jake — professional problem-finder, unofficial "Enterprise Support Engineer Extraordinaire" (working on making that title official).

For the last 10+ years, I've been the person customers get handed to when the first answer didn't work. Sometimes that means staying calm while someone describes their production outage like it's a crime scene. Sometimes it means going three layers deeper into a log file than anyone wanted to, because "it's probably fine" is not an acceptable root cause. I debugged developer-platform APIs at SmartThings back when smart homes were still mostly a punchline, and these days at Bright AI I keep a 180+ device edge fleet talking to the mothership — APIs, cloud, Linux, root cause, the whole chain, start to finish.

Off the clock: I run a home lab that has fully outgrown any reasonable justification — a self-hosted Fedora server with more Podman containers than I can count without checking, and a separate Home Assistant setup wired into an LLM API because "can it think about my thermostat" was a question I needed answered. I use Claude and Cursor every day, and I've developed strong opinions about the gap between "the AI said so" and "the AI is actually right" — closing that gap is basically my whole professional identity at this point. My toughest audience these days is 15 months old, entirely pre-verbal, and completely unmoved by anything that isn't peekaboo — which is humbling, but also probably good practice: if you can't land a joke with someone who doesn't have words yet, your material needs work.

Why ReadMe: I've spent my career on the support side of API-first products, close enough to bad documentation to know exactly what it costs — in tickets, in trust, in developers who give up and go build something else. I want to be on the team that closes that gap instead of cleaning up after it. I'll also admit: a decade of enterprise support roles has trained a certain seriousness into me that I don't think serves anyone well, least of all me — so a job posting that tells candidates to err on the side of whimsy and use owl doodles liberally reads less like a culture question and more like a permission slip I've been waiting for. Also, I built this whole page and hooked it up to a GitHub repo before you even offered me the job, so. Extraordinaire's not entirely a joke — and I'm ready to give a hoot about documentation the way it deserves.