Jason Pickens
Software Engineer at Upwave
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJason Pickens is a senior software engineer and technical leader with over a decade of experience designing and shipping reactive, cloud-native systems across startups and mid-sized companies. He combines hands-on Scala and Reactive Systems expertise with practical architectural leadership, having modernized stacks, implemented IaC with Pulumi, and improved observability and CI/CD practices. Jason has driven high-impact product work—from rewriting frontends in Scala.js and extracting GraphQL bindings to upstreaming a ZIO fiber fix—demonstrating both deep implementation skills and a focus on user-facing outcomes. His open-source contributions to prominent tooling like sbt and giter8 reflect a commitment to ecosystem reliability and developer productivity. Comfortable oscillating between individual contributor and CTO-level strategy, he repeatedly turns technical debt into scalable platforms that enable rapid delivery. Based in Auckland, he brings a blend of pragmatic engineering, community-mindedness, and a knack for turning complex distributed problems into dependable solutions.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
NCEA Level 3, NCEA Level 3 at Kerikeri High SchoolBachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science at University of Auckland
English
Stackoverflow
5,823reputation
341kreached
60answers
92questions
Github Skills (15)
scala10
sbt10
build-tools10
ssh10
jgit10
text-processing9
template-engine9
templater9
zinc9
javas8
java8
disambiguation6
typelib6
scaladoc6
dll6
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
sbt/sbt
Jun 2017 - Jul 2022
sbt, the interactive build tool
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:1 review, 9 commits, 8 PRs in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Jason primarily focused on improving the sbt build tool. Their contributions include changes to the compiler bridge, the addition of a test to reproduce a bug, and modifications to the scripted plugin. They also addressed a bug related to console projects and improved the dependency management within the project.
sbtscalabuild-toolzinc
foundweekends/giter8
Apr 2020 - Apr 2020
a command line tool to apply templates defined on GitHub
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 3 PRs, 4 comments in 3 days
Contributions summary:Jason contributed to the `giter8` project by implementing features related to SSH key handling and template processing. They added options for specifying known hosts and Windows support, enhancing the tool's ability to clone repositories using SSH. Furthermore, the user addressed path resolution issues for Java 8 compatibility and included dependencies for SSH agent proxy to facilitate secure access to private repositories. Finally, they also addressed a bug that was causing an error when the template was not correctly loaded.
command-line-toolgiter8scalasbt-plugin
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