Jason Vondersmith is a Data Engineer originally from Westminster, Maryland. After graduating from The University of Maryland at College Park with a degree in Economics, which was the culmination of the greatest nine years of his life, he embarked out on a career in accounting. Five years later he decided that was not the right path for him, and he started a journey in Real Estate. Five years in a tough sales environment again led to the conclusion that he was still not satisfied. Eight months in an IT recruiting role was rock bottom. But it helped set Jason on the path he is currently on. The common theme throughout his career has been learning. No matter what he is doing, Jason loves to learn and grow. Since the end of 2015 that learning path has been all about data! In 2018 he completed a Master’s Degree in Decision Analytics from VCU.

It’s never to late to be what you might have been George Eliot

Jason is a techie and is obsessed with python, AWS, including S3, EC2, DynamoDB, and Linux!. Particularly, how those tools can be leveraged to get and merge data into large, usable data sets.

Jason has been able to find his true passion due to the support of his wife, Katheryn and is motivated to be the best he can be by his son Brooks. If Jason can tear himself away from Coursera, Pluralsight, A Cloud Guru or DataCamp he enjoys golf, absurdly spicy chicken wings and a good IPA.

So Why nothotdog?

If you are a techie, like me, you LOVE HBO’s Silicon Valley. It’s a comedy that takes aim at the absurdity of startup culture. In it’s iconic moment, they used Data Science to build an app that can detect food. “It’s the Shazaam of food!”. At first, it seems to work as expected, correctly identifying a hot dog. As the dollar signs and expectations grow in their minds, they try pizza. And what do they get? NOT HOT DOG!

To me it describes tech perfectly. In one moment there is the joy of making a working product. In the next, it’s the agony of knowing you need to fix some bugs.