Jay Schmidt

Senior Technical Product and Project Leader

About Me

JayCasual.jpg

I’m a tech leader who thrives on turning customer needs into valuable, real-world solutions – delivering results now and in the long run.

  • Project Management
  • Product Management
  • Product Evangelism
  • Solutions Architecture
  • Cross-Functional Team Leadership
  • Mentoring

Accomplishments


Latest Post

Feb 28, 2026

The Confidence Mask

An anxious tech worker at a desk with a confident mask pushed up on their forehead, while coworkers in the background all wear similar masks

The relationship between confidence and arrogance in the tech industry is bizarre. When a founder confidently states that their new app will “revolutionize society,” we applaud. Yet we’ve all sat in a meeting listening to an engineer confidently explain how their new framework solves every known tech problem, and we roll our eyes.

Read more

All Posts

2026

  • Feb 28, 2026 - The Confidence Mask
  • Feb 17, 2026 - Weaponized Ignorance: When Not Knowing Becomes Strategy
  • Feb 6, 2026 - Designed Ignorance: When Not Knowing Is the System Working
  • Jan 13, 2026 - Same as it Ever Was: The Luxury of Ignorance
  • 2025

  • Nov 14, 2025 - Building World-Class Support: Commandos, Not Armies or MPs
  • Oct 11, 2025 - Drowning in Beeps
  • Sep 24, 2025 - The Metrics Game: When Toxic Leadership Comes Full Circle
  • Sep 2, 2025 - Marketing Fluff: What Tech People Really Mean (and How to Avoid It)
  • Aug 28, 2025 - From Line Cook to Chef: Lessons for Presales Engineering
  • Aug 2, 2025 - Leaders Who Fail Up: The LinkedIn Rebrand of Failure
  • Aug 1, 2025 - Running Slurm and Flux on Oxide: Dual HPC Schedulers in Your Own Rack
  • Jul 15, 2025 - PXE Booting on Oxide
  • Jun 12, 2025 - Printed on 24 lb. Paper
  • Jun 10, 2025 - Everything Is Political: Embrace It
  • May 23, 2025 - ‘This Is Just How We Do Things Now’: The Quiet Collapse of Standards
  • May 13, 2025 - Find a New Band
  • Feb 21, 2025 - The Fence We Keep Ignoring
  • 2024

  • Dec 23, 2024 - The Parable of the Slow-Boiled Frog
  • Aug 13, 2024 - Managing Kubernetes Contexts with kubectx
  • Apr 18, 2024 - Mirroring Github to Gitlab…Without Premium
  • Apr 15, 2024 - Of NGINX and Pianos
  • Feb 7, 2024 - Cleaner Dockerfiles with HEREDOC
  • Jan 22, 2024 - Adding Trivy to Harbor
  • Jan 7, 2024 - Setting up Harbor as a Local Docker Registry
  • 2023

  • Sep 10, 2023 - Installing the Official NGINX OSS via Ansible Playbook
  • Aug 7, 2023 - Installing the Official NGINX OSS Package via Script
  • Aug 1, 2023 - Breaking Down Silos
  • Jul 14, 2023 - Proxmox LXC and Terraform
  • Jul 13, 2023 - Setting Up Devboxen With Ansible
  • Jul 5, 2023 - Proxmox VMs and Terraform
  • Jun 25, 2023 - Building Proxmox Templates via Script
  • Jun 22, 2023 - Convergent and Divergent Thinking
  • Jun 14, 2023 - Systems and the Cobra Effect
  • Jun 13, 2023 - Umpires
  • Jun 12, 2023 - Situational Awareness
  • Jun 9, 2023 - Back Online

  • Contact

    Always happy to connect and talk about technology, leadership, and where they intersect. See the contact buttons above to connect with me on social media or send me an email. If you’re interested, you can download my resume here. Cheers!

    My current local time is .

    jay@jayschmidt.us