About
I am Jason Scheirer, a completely unremarkable software developer in the Bay Area initially from the Inland Empire.
I suppose if you’re skimming this site for the first time you just want to know what I do now to know if I’m worth listening to: I am a software engineer for Notion Labs, Inc., a purveyor of malleable software. I work on the Desktop team writing Desktop things, and more specifically, I am the Windows domain expert and usually the person who fixes bugs on Notion Desktop in Windows. It’s an Electron app, but please don’t hold that against me: I do my best to make it not suck, and I do my best to make sure it’s more than just the web page with in a different set of window chrome.
A rough timeline of my life as a software engineer:
- Start programming BASIC in elementary school, escalating to pirated QuickBasic and Turbo Pascal, as well as legal but squirrely DJGPP/RHIDE/Allegro
- Get a part-time job in late high school writing “web applications”
- Get bored in intro CS classes and change majors to Linguistics
- Decide that taking a mere full courseload is for suckers who like sleep and good grades, so instead also add working 30 hrs/wk to pay tuition and taking night classes to teach English at the same time
- Get as much CS coursework done as possible before hitting the unit limit for graduation, managing to squeeze in the minor just in time
- List about from company to company in SoCal writing software for 10 years, mostly Python/C/C++, mostly geospatial adjacent
- Move to Bay Area and list about from startup to startup writing software for 10 years, mostly Python/Go/Ruby, mostly social adjacent
A rough timeline of my entire life, including the future:
- Born
- Childhood
- Early adulthood
- Adulthood
- Writing bullet points in a text editor
- (Speculative) Dead
See my /uses page for more
information about my things.
I do not have any sort of analytics on this page. I have no idea what my traffic or “engagement” stats look like. I could be getting 1 hit a month, I could be getting 100000 hits a day on some single blog post. I honestly have no idea and it’s not something I want to think about.
There’s also no very little Javascript
on this page. I can’t justify “enhancing” the
“experience” of viewing words on a screen with some
stupid runtime-in-the-browser trickery.
(Late 2022 update: Javascript exists, where necessary, for “functional” pages like to display games but not for content load or navigation UI trickery.)
(Early 2025 update: Javascript exists on pages with
mermaid codeblocks to convert them to SVG inline.
Still no deep tricks, though.)
(Mid 2025 update: I use Javascript for the search feature via pagefind client-side.)
If I can ask you but one favor, it is this: if you like the site, tell immediate friends and subscribe to it in your favorite RSS reader. I do not write to provide Internet Brain Geniuses with material to fractally complain about to feel better about themselves on Social Media. I would rather those people not know I exist. Please only share these posts on places where the comments section do not devolve into utter idiocy.
If this site provides you with value, great. If not, keep in mind I owe you nothing.