Halftone portrait of JR Smith with a butterfly

JR Smith

Senior Software Engineer Virginia Beach, VA

Two decades across the stack, front to back. I lead teams, untangle legacy systems, and still sketch in the margins. The tools keep changing underneath. Adapting is the constant.

Recent Work

Recent Play

About me

I’m a 40-something year old senior developer. I live in Virginia Beach, VA with my spouse Meghan and an oddball cohort of animals.

These are the things that matter most to me in the world.

Annie, a pug Meghan and me having a blast at the Frida Kahlo exhibit. Rudy, a pointer, with a tennis ball
Buccal, a tabby cat, on a blanket Cheddar, an orange medium hair cat, in a square of sun Nibbler, a black and gray cat missing a back leg and tail, on the couch with me
The squad: Myself and Meghan, Annie, Rudy, Buccal, Cheddar, Nibbler

Nibbler and Annie are no longer with us, but their memories loom large, so they stay in the mosaic.

Work

I’ve been a do-whatever-is-needed full-stack developer for a long time. I got into this making websites to make fun of my friends in high school and never really stopped. I discovered the cgi-bin folder one day, started learning perl and php, and a large part of my life just sort of set into place. I love this job because there’s always something new to learn, improve, or rewrite. It never gets boring.

Languages, frameworks, and platforms

  • Go
  • TypeScript / JavaScript
  • Python
  • PHP
  • Wordpress (but please no)
  • Several Contentful-like CMSes
  • Honestly, probably most CMSes
  • Google Cloud Platform and AWS
  • The lesser clouds, like Vercel, Netlify, etc
  • Random devops stuff
  • I’m a decent sysadmin as well

I pride myself on flexibility - I like digging into esoteric legacy systems, learning new stacks, responding to change. I’ve purposefully avoided specializing or allowing myself to be pigeonholed so I can have as wide a breadth of experience as possible. Half of the work is connecting the right dots in the right way. Knowing how a lot of dots work makes that easier.

Having said that… man, it would be nice to focus on one thing for a while.

Hobbies

I’m a big enjoyer of both sit very still and move around a lot activities.

Sit very still

  • Movies
  • Reading
  • The most prestige of all prestige TV
  • Gaming, occasionally
  • Writing, occasionally
  • Painting, less occasionally, but I’m decent
  • Meditation

Move around a lot

  • Hiking
  • TikTok challenges
  • Rowing
  • Getting beaten up by small, violent children
  • Bouncing my leg
  • Carrying every grocery bag in one trip
  • Meditation (I’m not doing it right)

I’m a homebody most of the time, though, at this stage of my life. Peace has become valuable to me. The world is crazier every day, so I’ve tried to make home a sanctuary. It’s a work in progress.

Recent consumption

Listening

Watching

Reading

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