Welcome
I’m Jason Anthony Guy, and I’ll be your host.
Launched in 2024, JAG's Workshop is a virtual space for me to explore, learn, and share with you a curated collection of eclectic ephemera: The things that capture my attention in my explorations of my many interests—from technology to travel, coding to cocktails, photography to politics—all contextualized with pithy, sometimes serious, sometimes snarky commentary, plus longer-form articles, analysis, and insights, and the sometimes unexpected ways these interests intersect.
Why JAG’s “Workshop”?
A workshop brings to mind several concepts. For me, it’s two things:
- A space for crafting quality wares. A craftsperson building a table in their garage workshop.
- A place to polish content over time. A playwright staging a new work in a theatre workshop.
Both evoke a spirit of learning and exploration, with twin goals of improving a skill and sharing the results.
JAG’s Workshop is an idea to be explored, built, and polished, in public. My goal is to create compelling content that weaves together all of my many interests. Perhaps it will spark or satisfy your own curiosity.
About Jason
After 30-plus years in various roles in technology management, support, and software development that turned out “pretty good”, I retired to spend time on “something else wonderful”.
I’ve always been curious. As a kid I was always asking “what’s that?”, “how’s that work?” and “why?” Satisfying that curiosity often meant deep dives into new areas, and while I often learned something useful, that was rarely the goal. I simply wanted to know, experience, and understand things: To learn for the sake of learning. Future utility usually wasn’t much of a consideration, although—spoiler alert!—the things I learned sometimes came in handy in life.
I’ve loved computers since I first learned to program one at the tender age of 11 or 12, back when that was considered a young age to learn to program computers, and technology became a driving force in my life and career.
Though I’ve never really considered myself “creative”, over the years I also fell in love with writing, acting, photography, public speaking, podcasting, and other creative pursuits. In college, I pursued degrees in both computer science and in theatre, television and film production.
I’ve been especially fascinated by how we leverage technology to fuel our creativity, with the gear and tools that support and sustain creativity as interesting to me as the acts of creativity themselves.
It turns out I’ve been living at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, long before I’d ever heard the term.
“… technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
Steve Jobs
Membership
Please consider supporting my writing and explorations by becoming a member. You can join for free or select a paid tier ($5/month or $50/year). Signing up motivates me to write more knowing you’re reading and interested in these eclectic explorations. Thank you.
Colophon
All my work is done on Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Vision Pro (in roughly that order). Most of the site was built on a refurbished 2022 13" MacBook Air M2 with 16GB memory and 1TB storage (in Midnight—the color makes it go faster), and a 2021 14” MacBook Pro M1.
I use a wide variety of tools to build, write, and maintain the site, including BBEdit, Drafts, IA Writer, Acorn, Affinity Designer, Pinboard.in, Github, Working Copy and much more. Many of these are small, one or two person software companies. Please support indie developers.
jagsworkshop.com is powered by Ghost, an open source blogging engine with built in membership features.
It’s a Nodejs app, using Handlebarsjs as the template engine. It runs on a Digital Ocean VPS running Ubuntu 2204, with 1GB memory and 25GB SSD. It uses a custom theme I created (heavily inspired by popular blogs such as Daring Fireball, Kottke and Stratechery). The domain is registered through NameCheap and email is hosted at Fastmail.
