The Basics

My name is Jason Roberts and I'm a serial entrepreneur, freelance software developer and podcaster living in Pasadena, CA with my wife Sandy and three kids - Colby (8), Isabel "Izzy" (6) and Areli (5). I've co-founded six companies since graduating college in 1993, hopping back and forth between the worlds of automated, high-frequency trading and web/mobile applications. I've been working as a freelance coder since early 2009 while bootstrapping my two latest startup projects, AnyFu and AppIgnite. If you need help on a project, please read about my consulting work.

How about some Q and A?

What languages and technologies do you specialize in?

I've pretty much lead two distinct programmer lives with one focused on building web applications (using Javascript, Node.js, PHP, MySQL/PostgreSQL, MongoDB, HTML, CSS, etc) and the other centered on building automated, high-frequency equity and option trading systems (using C++, .NET, Java, VB6, etc). Recently, I built a fairly sophisticated geolocation-based iPhone app (think Foursquare meets Groupon) for a client on the Titanium platform, which was a lot of fun so I'm hoping to do some more work in that area as well.

What did you study in school?

I graduated with a B.A in Mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1993, but not that that means anything as I'm pretty sure I've forgotten most of whatever I learned in college. ;)

Why do you do a podcast?

I do the podcast mainly because I enjoy discussing tech and startups, but also because I just really like to talk. ;) It also gives my co-host and I the opportunity to interview and learn from a number of extremely talented and interesting people who we wouldn't have the chance to meet under normal circumstances.

In addition, there's the outside chance that we'll eventually build an audience large enough that the time spent on the show could actually pay for itself either via advertising or donations. Okay, so that might be a stretch, but we can dream, right? ;)

More to come ...