About Me

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

Areas of Focus

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

Accomplishments

Talks and Webinars

Articles

Education and Certs

Latest Post

Feb 6, 2026

Structured Ignorance: When Not Knowing Is the System Working

Airline cockpit in flight, photo by John Christian Fjellestad (CC BY 2.0)

Early in my career, I was the DBA at a multinational distribution company. One night the entire APAC region went down and I was frantically paged at midnight. The database was decidedly unhappy, and as I investigated the problem it seemed tied to an application update that was deployed during the US day. The APAC executives were furious and wanted the problem resolved.

All Posts

2026

Feb 6, 2026 - Structured 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 Schmidt