Meet Jason, our CTO!
Jason is the CTO of OwnersRoom. He joined the team in March 2018 and has since then built a development team of 3 brilliant engineers who are working with a cutting edge tech stack.
Read on to get to know more about Jason and his role in the team.
Using technology you enjoy to solve a problem that you are genuinely interested in is basically every engineer's dream.
During our research for this blog, one of our colleagues described Jason as “a highly approachable, humorous and knowledgeable tech wizard who can magically convert coffee into code”. While that pretty much sums him up, we’ll try to dig a bit deeper so you can get to know Jason even better.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
After receiving my bachelor in Computer Engineering back in Newfoundland, Canada I moved to Norway and started working in Trolltech doing C++ stuff. Trolltech was eventually acquired by Nokia and my time there taught me a lot about mobile development, product management and big company bureaucracy. I left Nokia and joined Cutehacks where I was a consultant doing mobile and backend development for startups. I then worked a short period in Schibsted as an Engineering Manager before opportunity came knocking and I decided to lead the development team in OwnersRoom!
What does a typical work day look like for you?
I spend a lot of time discussing things with people and being a sparring partner, especially on the product and engineering sides. I review a lot of code and write plenty myself when time permits, but mostly I try to be an enabler for the team by removing obstacles and just supporting them however I can.
What does the tech stack look like, and why did you choose this model?
I’m quite pleased with how our tech stack has turned out. We run a microservices architecture on Google Cloud Platform with most of our services written in Go and communicating with each other over gRPC. We use GraphQL to expose our backend to our frontend and absolutely love it. Our frontend is using React and we have started migrating our code to TypeScript to take advantage of the strong type safety we have everywhere else in the stack.
What’s the best thing about working here in OwnersRoom?
I would say that the best thing for me is the trinity of people, technology and problem space. Using technology you enjoy to solve a problem that you are genuinely interested in is basically every engineer’s dream. When you can do that together with a group of people that are smart, passionate and fun to work with, it makes going to work a pleasure!
What do you like to do outside of work?
I guess I am fairly well assimilated into Norwegian culture by now. I spend a lot of time at my cabin with my family where we go skiing and hiking. I wish I could say that I spend more time reading books than I do watching Netflix, but that would be a massive lie.
Who should we interview next and why?
Interview Benedikte next because she’s an integral part of our product team and all of our customers should get to know her better.
