Jared Smith is a long time member of the Asterisk community and is a co-founder of the Asterisk Documentation Project. He co-authored the books Asterisk, The Future of Telephony, Editions I & II. As the architect of one of the early large-scale Asterisk installations, he also has a wealth of practical Asterisk knowledge. Jared has taught Asterisk training courses around the world, including Brazil, Canada, France, Jamaica, Korea, United Kingdom, and United States. Most recently, he has worked for Digium (the commercial company behind the Asterisk project) as Community Relations Manager and Training Manager.
Jared has also been an active member of the Fedora Project helping with documentation for several years. He was elected to the Fedora Documentation Steering Committee in 2007. He is a co-founder of the Utah Asterisk Users’ Group and helped to revive FREDLug, the Fredericksburg (Virginia) Linux Users’ Group.
Jared has well over a decade of large-scale systems administration, network operations, and programming experience along with several years of community relations, training, and voice-over-IP experience.
Public Speaker
Jared has been speaking at user groups and technical conferences worldwide and serving on expert panels since 2004. He speaks on such topics as Voice Over IP Solutions, XML DocBook publishing, Open Source software, Top 10 Asterisk Tricks, and Community Relations Issues.
Active in the “Offline” Community
Jared volunteers for his local Boy Scouts of America Troop, and serves on the scout committee. He has been an 11-year old Scout Leader and will attend BSA Camp in 2010 with his son to celebrate 100 years of Scouting. He has also volunteered his time to a startup charter school by providing free telephony consulting services. Citizens for Families, a Utah group fighting to keep children from being exposed to inappropriate material on- and off-line, awarded Jared and his wife Jenny the “Protector of Children” award for their services in 2007. Jared is active at church, having served as a Children’s Sunday School (Primary) Teacher, Technical Consultant, Quorum Counselor, and Missionary Leader. He served a two-year mission for his church in Chile and Paraguay, and he speaks Spanish.
Smith Family at the Family Farm, 2009
Family Life
Jared is married with 2 children, 2 cats, and a dog. His family lives in Virginia on a 300+ acre farm that has been in his wife’s family for over 100 years.
Fun Facts
As a college Freshman in 1994, Jared won a prestigious competition at Utah State University: he stuffed 26 jumbo marshmallows in his mouth and successfully repeated the words “I am a chubby bunny” — that’s half a bag of marshmallows!
Jared met his wife at a “Nerd Camp” following their Junior years of high school. Their love blossomed at the Advanced High School Studies Program (AHSSP) 1993 at Brigham Young University, where students studied the computer programming language ProLog for two weeks and earned two hours of college credit. Jared kept in touch by letter and fax (Jenny was the only other person Jared knew with a fax modem). They were married 3 years later, almost to the day of their first meeting.
Jared used to write love letters to his wife in Prolog:
loves(Jared, Jenny)
Jared is a skilled marksman and enjoys shooting clay pigeons with his friends.
Jared is an Eagle Scout.
Jared is an Honorary Member of the Patawomeck Tribe of Virginia, the tribe of Pocahontas.
Settlers of Catan, Seafarers of Catan, and Cities and Knights Expansion are Jared’s guilty pleasure. He and his wife play often with several groups of friends — they are hard core fans and even pass along a trophy with removable names to the winner of each game!
Jared is interested in family history and has enjoyed several visits to England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland searching out his roots.
The church choir is always disappointed when Jared travels, as he sings Bass (usually) and Tenor (if pressed) during the choir’s weekly practices. What he lacks in musical talent he makes up for in effort.
Even though Jared has a blog, he’s not very good at writing in it. He doesn’t enjoy tooting his own horn, and would rather write about something technical than talk about himself.
One thought on “About Me”