About

My name is Jamie Hale. I'm a software engineer in the suburbs of Toronto. I have a degree in computer science, and a 28-year career building software systems. Throughout, I have focused not on specific technologies or tech stacks, but on the craft of software design and what it means to "build a better developer".

Most of my career has been in places where software 100% has to work: nuclear inspection systems, bank trading floors, crypto exchanges. I've been a founder, a consultant, a technical lead, and a head of engineering. Today I'm an infrastructure and security engineer, keeping the deployment pipeline effective and efficient, the platform operational, and our customer data secure.

Security has always been part of the job, whether or not it's called out in the job description. I started hacking networks in 1993. I taught myself x86 assembly language by reverse-engineering computer viruses in 1997 (and how to pick locks in 1998). In 2021 I ranked as high as 11th in Canada on Hack The Box.

I taught object-oriented C++ at Seneca Polytechnic for a summer. I've coached FIRST LEGO League robotics teams. I still periodically visit primary school classrooms to talk to kids about programming and what it means to be "a coder".

Away from work, I play guitar and drums and record music. And I play all sorts of tabletop roleplaying games, new and old, a hobby I picked up in 1983.

Why "Small Army of Nerds"?

At a previous job, when budgets were tight, I joked at a department meeting that we had finally received money to fix things - that we had enough to hire "a small army of nerds".

Sadly the budget fell through, and I eventually moved on.

Two years later, I had an opportunity to work as a contractor for that same department, recieving the budget that had finally been released. I was the small army.

I embrace, embody, and absolutely celebrate "nerd". I thrive on knowledge. I read voraciously. In the right circumstances, I will talk your ear off about the history of Dungeons & Dragons... or about the ingenious if unbelievably complex inner workings of the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) on Windows 2000.