About

My name is Derek Smithson. I’m a programmer, father, and tech enthusiast. If there are new gadgets or software to be explored, I’m probably there. I work mostly out of my home office down in Phoenix, Arizona where I’ve lived for over 20 years now.

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Background

I worked for ~12 years at Vista Systems (later acquired by Christie Digital) where I started in technical support and cut my teeth to become a developer primarily focused on products like the Spyder Video processor series. I left there for a few years to work at IO Datacenters (later acquired by Iron Mountain) and was spun out to a technology company called Baselayer which made datacenter software and modules (think shipping containers that house servers but don’t tell them I said that). After a couple of years working on datacenter software, I went back to Christie Digital for a stint where I worked on Spyder X80 and the Terra SDVoE video processing products, but only lasted about a year. I’ve been working at GPS Insight in Scottsdale, Arizona for over two years now. It’s a wonderful company with wonderful people, and I have been absolutely loving solving hard problems at scale.

Note: this blog, its content and opinions are my own.