About Me

Hi, I'm Jason Roman. I'm a software developer near Detroit, MI primarily focused on building web applications. I have been working in the industry since early '00s. My focus has always been in writing code in the most efficient and 'correct' way possible, while structuring and commenting the code in such a way that any developer or even non-developer could look at it for the first time and understand the purpose of the code and how it is executing.

Present

I have learned a great deal over the years but have never really shared any of this knowledge. Like my work with gaming, I would like to give back and provide value to others, whether it be current code such as Javascript plugins, past code that others might find useful, or blogging about software development in general. My goal is to provide that with this website, rather than just being an online resume or vanity site.

Gaming

Like many others, I became addicted to the Half-Life mod Counter-Strike. At first I simply competed in leagues, but I wanted to be more involved in the community. This led to answering a call to create an application for the anti-cheating software Punkbuster. The application converted user screenshots from a proprietary format to JPG for Linux servers (which is what the majority of servers ran on). This helped catch 1000s of cheaters and help keep leagues clean and free of cheaters.

After that, the Cyberathlete Amateur League decided to create the 1st league where players would be drafted instead of having players pick their own teams. I wrote an IRC bot that would be used by the team owners to draft the teams which led to records being broken for the most number of users in an IRC channel. I also did weekly writeups on all of the matches for the website Domain of Games.

I still felt like more could be done to help make these leagues more professional, which led to my development of GameSense, the first statistics/match/tournament tracking for professional esports. This system debuted on the website GotFrag in 2004 and was a unanimous success among the community. My work on GameSense ended when GotFrag was bought out by Major League Gaming in the summer of 2007. They decided to no longer focus on any of the games that GameSense supported and most of us went our separate ways, including me.

History

I stumbled upon programming in the late 90s in high school while downloading games for my TI-82 graphing calculator. I was always interested in making games when I grew up but had no idea what that entailed. Upon realizing I could view the code for these games, I decided to give it a try, remaking the Intellivision game Astrosmash. From there I took a few programming classes at my local community college while still in high school, which eventually led to earning Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Oakland University in Rochester Hills, MI.

While attending Oakland University I worked for a local consulting firm, writing Visual Basic applications and websites in ASP. After graduating I spent the next 9 years working at General Dynamics Land Systems, working for several years on vehicle projects coded in C before transitioning to writing internal tool applications in PHP/MySQL.

My growth as a developer eventually stagnated and I moved on to being a web developer at North American Bancard, focused on their PayAnywhere application for accepting credit card payments on phones and tablets.