Welcome to The Reasonable Programmer

Hello everybody, my name is Jason Olson. Welcome to my humble home on the web! I'm a computer programmer, musician, husband, and father. I generally consider myself a creative on a lifelong journey of learning. I love computer history, programming languages, computer internals, science, math, art, books, and poems.

I enjoy learning. I enjoy helping people. I enjoy creating new things, be it software, music, or art. But I must admit that sometimes I struggle getting lost in my own excitement. I struggle with striving for perfection, the perfect design, the perfect melody, the perfect shading. As I've lived, I've learned how enjoyable simplicity is. There's something inspirational about something that fulfills its exact purpose.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

On this site, I like to write about things I'm learning on my journey. I hope that these writings may be impactful to at least one person out there. If you stay here and read along, you'll see me through all my ups and downs. I'll get excited about different things, and possibly discouraged by others. One day I may be discussing computer programming, and the next day be sharing some poems or words of wisdom I recently discovered that spoke to me.

I strive to uplift others. I strive to put beautiful things into the world. I strive to accept my own faults and to be better with each new day. I hope you enjoy your stay here on my humble corner of the internet!

I've been active in the tech community as a writer and speaker. I currently have published courses available on Pluralsight.com. In the past, I have delivered talks at Microsoft //Build (2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015), TechEd North America, TechEd Europe, internal Microsoft conferences, and many .NET user groups over the years. I've appeared as a guest on podcasts like .NET Rocks and Hanselminutes, produced shows for Channel 9 on MSDN, and written articles for MSDN magazine.