Hey, I’m Jayson.

I'm from the more laid-back part of the Southwest US originally, but I've been lucky enough to live in major cities on my country’s East and West Coast, as well as it's North and South borders, and do a fair bit of travel in between. These days, my partner, my two senior dogs and I all happily call Detroit our home.

I wholly believe a person is more than the sum of their experiences, but for a first impression, I figured they ought be a good place to start. So:

Pro

In my career I strived (strove? Have striven!?) for diversity of experience. This gave me the chance to work across a variety of industries and really learn a lot about the infrastructure of modern society, accomplish some awesome things, hone a broad base of skills, and meet a huge swath of people. I’ve worked in healthcare, a Kickstarter start-up, a motorcycle parts site, a snarky internet t-shirt company, and a luggage & travel brand. I’ve also done some light consulting. I’m a Generalist who’s always excited to expand into another skill or domain.

Thematically, my work has been connected by taking things in beginning stages to the point where they’re ready to be handed off to an established expert or a specialist, or put plainly, go from “we’ve never done this before!” to “Alright, we’re ready to hand it to someone who does only this now.” Currently I’m focused on my family life and personal development, so taking a step back from career goals.

Personal

I love coffee, whiskey, cocktails and steak, but try to avoid having too much of any. I also love my my two older Rhodesian Ridgeback - Aussie Shepherds. I try to never avoid them — there’s no such thing as too much there. You’ve probably realized I talk too much, and hopefully will realize I have a strong dry sense of humor… but am not above an easy pun.

In my personal life, I’m largely self-taught, but heavily leaning on a network of good people to make that possible, regularly. I’ve lived and travelled across my country, spoken with friends in multiple languages (poorly but sufficiently), had the joy of trying many different culture’s homemade foods, and even managed to get a full night’s sleep once or twice.

I have an extremely broad pallet, culture wise, and enjoy cooking, comic books, pop culture, and learning. I really love learning new things. I hope to get out of the Fab Academy a good base for learning more, but also the abilities to create where I haven’t had the option before.

Principles

Since I was going to be making a lot of stuff, it seemed like a good idea to try and put down a set of principles in writing. Kind of like a personal Code of Conduct for my Fab journey, to refer back to if I'm unsure about something or to help better explain my approach to this Documentation for others.

After some contemplation and alliteration, I arrived at:

Privacy 👥

• With all photos and credits, I try to balance the need to credit with the respect for one’s right to privacy. All persons appearing in photos or screenshots are asked for their permission first, and I ask how they’d prefer to be credited when relevant. I do not take credit for any work that is not my own, however make effort to make sure everyone helping me is offered the chance to have the level of anonymity they expect. This seems nitpicky, but the intersection of online Personally Identifying Information, “Big Data”, AI, automated interpretation of unstructured data, and corporate to State-Sponsored level manipulation campaigns is likely within our lifetime. When coupled with how shockingly insecure and accessible most of our personal information already is, it seems like a best practice to be mindful of this now, and how it may impact others.

Personality 🎭

• After discussing with my advisor, I decided to include information about what’s going on in my personal life as well, in this documentation. I’ll try to avoid making this blog-like, but felt it was important not just for offering a picture of who I am to my evaluators, but for both my future-self and potential future students in Fab Academy, to offer a context to my thinking or approach at the time, as well as other stressors and how it affected my coursework. Fran’s Surviving Fab Academy video series has been really helpful for me because I immediately related, so hope this offers even a bit of some of the same.

Pollution bad ☣️

• Where possible, without drastically increasing my difficulty or compromising my assignments, safety or the like, I’m striving to try and be as sustainable and minimal waste as possible, so I might make some odd decisions coming from there. To my perspective this also includes reducing human exposure to plastics, although the solutions there are admittedly less straightforward. In any case, I’ll be trying to limit how much I generate single-use/disposable items, especially when in plastics or materials not easily processed through our local waste systems.

I hope this was enlightening, and I’m always happy to chat if you have any questions, ideas, want to reach out for help or clarification, or just want to send a meme.

I’m active and visible on the Fab Academy Mattermost instance, but can also be emailed at FabAcademyat JYSNdot GQ