My name is Jason ‘vanRijn’ Kasper.
The Jason part was given to me by my parents, though I have many times wished I had been named Richard the Third, after my Dad and Grandfather.
The Kasper part was passed down to me from my Dad, though there are some pretty interesting facts about the family’s lineage.
The ‘vanRijn’ part is something that happened on the way between then and now, but you can read more about that later.
The most important people in my life are my wife Linda and our three kids. I met Linda in San Diego years ago, and somehow convinced her to marry me anyway. Together we raised three excellent humans who are smarter, funnier, and more patient than I have any right to expect. They’re grown now and out on their own, building lives that make me proud. Most of what’s worth saying about my life comes back to some version of “and then we did X” or “Linda pointed out the obvious thing I’d missed.”
Church and family have always been strongly coupled for me. I’m a Christian, and that flavors who I am at a deep level — how I think about work, how I treat people, why I bother showing up well to anything. I don’t perform it loudly or argue about it, but I’m not going to pretend it isn’t load-bearing either.
My title at work is Software Engineer at Apple. The polite version: I’m a person who can usually figure out why the computer is doing the weird thing. I’ve been writing code for over twenty years and have never gotten tired of it. I love hard problems, I love finding solutions that already exist instead of reinventing wheels, and I owe a lot to the Open Source community for being a place where those solutions live in the open. If you want the resume version, I’m over at LinkedIn.
When I’m not at a keyboard for work, I’m usually at a keyboard for fun — Guild Wars 2 has had a permanent install on my machines for over a decade, and Ultra Street Fighter 4 is the one I keep coming back to when I want to lose at something familiar. Off the keyboard, fountain pens and Japanese paper are my analog hobby; movies are the family group activity; the occasional adventurous home improvement project is reliably where I get to practice being quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger — and where I find out, again, that I’m still learning.
The common thread is that I love having fun with my family, friends, and co-workers — unexpected snowball fights, lengthy video-game sessions, random Airzooka missions, late-night raids that go later than they should. Through all of it, I shall strive to not lose the boy inside for the man that is seen going to work everyday.
If you’d like to say hi, vR@movingparts.net is the best way.