Oakland, California

Hi, I’m Jason.

I lead engineering teams building developer platforms, infrastructure, and AI developer tools. I also build open-source tools and other projects on my own time.

What I'm working on

Now live · Open-source Obsidian plugin

FirstRecall

Turn your Obsidian notes into active-recall practice.

FirstRecall is an open-source plugin for Obsidian Desktop. It creates recall questions and study cards from your notes. In Study Mode, you try an answer before revealing the source. Your Markdown stays unchanged. Choose your own AI provider, or use the hosted Simonides preview.

Get it on ObsidianSource code

A closer look

Scroll through. Open any image to see the details.

  • Test what you remember: FirstRecall Study Mode hides the source until you reveal the answer.
  • Turn your notes into study cards: summaries, recall questions, and key terms beside your Obsidian notes.
  • Focus your review: a Note Brief with the core idea, review priorities, and a self-test.
  • Choose your AI: use the included Simonides trial, an API key, terminal apps, or a local model.

Now live · Free preview

Simonides

An optional hosted AI service for FirstRecall.

Simonides generates recall material from the note sections you select. The free preview requires no account, API key, or payment details.

Explore Simonides
FirstRecall’s AI settings with Simonides hosted AI trial selected, alongside API key, terminal app, and local server options.
Select Simonides in FirstRecall’s AI model settings to get started. Open the screenshot for a closer look. Generation sends the selected note content to Simonides. You can also use FirstRecall with your own cloud or local provider.

In progress

Thoughtmark

Thoughtmark saves your social likes and bookmarks in a personal archive, organized by folder and tag so you can find them again.

Thoughtmark showing saved X likes and bookmarks in a three-column card layout, with folders and search.

Recently shipped

LLM-Now

One command for the LLM providers you already use.

LLM-Now discovers local, CLI, and cloud providers, saves reusable shortcuts, and keeps model output clean for scripts and pipes.

brew install swartzrock/tap/llm-nowView on GitHub
BYOK Runtime provider picker showing Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, xAI, OpenRouter, Ollama, Codex CLI, and Claude CLI options

byok-runtime

In progress

Build BYOK AI apps with one TypeScript API for user-owned cloud keys, local models, model discovery, and CLI providers.

View repository

Where I've worked

Stripe

Financial infrastructure

Twitch

Live video

Snowflake

Data cloud

Sentry

Application monitoring

I’manengineeringleaderwith20+yearsscalingdeveloperplatforms,infrastructure,andtheteamsbehindthematStripe,Twitch,Snowflake,andSentry.I’veruntwoteamsofsevenatonceandshippedsolutionsthatsavedcompaniesmillionsayear.

More projects

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