Jason Pike

About

I'm Jason Pike, though most people who've known me a while call me Spike. I live in Atlanta with my wife Karly.

By day I run Southeast Surplus Co, a resale operation: I source surplus tools, electronics, and household gear, and move them through eBay and local marketplaces. It's part treasure hunt, part logistics problem, and I've automated as much of it as I can: the photography pipeline, the listing creation, the bookkeeping. Handling hundreds of products a year has a side effect: I have strong, tested opinions about what's actually worth buying.

The rest of my time goes to building things. I keep a home server that runs our household's software: recipe management, bookmarks, dashboards, a bot that answers eBay buyer questions. I built my wife an app for her crochet patterns. When I notice I'm doing something tedious twice, I usually end up writing code so I never do it a third time. The write-ups live in Projects.

A little background

I'm an Atlanta native, born here in the 1970s, though my family didn't stay long. We followed my dad's career with Colonial Foods and Big Star around middle and south Georgia, so I grew up on the move: Forsyth, Smarr, back to Forsyth, then Tifton, Garden Valley out in Macon County, Montezuma, and finally Perry, where I graduated from Perry High School.

I stayed in middle Georgia for school. I went to the college in Macon that kept renaming itself while I was enrolled: Macon Junior College, then Macon College, then Macon State College, and today Middle Georgia State University, where I earned a bachelor's degree in Information Technology. I also hold a certificate in Business Management and Entrepreneurship from Wiregrass Georgia Technical College. In plain terms, that one taught me to write a real business plan, read a P&L, and work with the SBA and the Georgia SBDC to get a venture funded, which is about as good a foundation for running a resale business as I could ask for.

In 2010 I moved back to Atlanta, closing the loop on where I started, and I've been here ever since, now inside the perimeter. I'm a dad of three, including one who's already grown. I try to get over to see my mom a couple of times a week, and the rest of the time I'm out enjoying everything this city and its people have to offer.

Now

Some things I like

Around Atlanta

You haven't really lived in Atlanta until you've had Fellini's Pizza. A few more of my regular haunts: the gloriously over-the-top Regal at Atlantic Station, which shows big movies the way they're meant to be seen; The Yard Milkshake Bar near the Georgia World Congress Center; Home grown and its little in-house coffee bar; and JJ's Fish and Chicken, a genuine Atlanta staple. I've been tempted to see the Clermont Lounge for myself, though I've heard the stories. And worth the drive north: Dutch Monkey Donuts in Forsyth County, some of the best donuts you'll ever eat. One quest still open: a great steakhouse that does proper dry-aged steaks. Recommendations very welcome.

Reading and watching

Right now I'm tearing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. Those books make me laugh out loud, and Jeff Hays on narration is about as good as it gets. I can't wait for books nine and ten (hopefully next year), or for what Seth MacFarlane does with the live-action adaptation. Karly and I read Daniel Suarez's Daemon together and we're halfway through its sequel, Freedom™. We're also working our way through The Boys on Prime Video and Star Trek: Discovery. For tech news, I'm a daily Ars Technica reader.

Making and tinkering

I like to make and fix things. Growing up, my family kept a few rental houses and I got put in charge of maintaining them; that handyman bug never left. I suspect it came down from my maternal grandfather, a master mechanic for Lockheed who was a blacksmith and farrier in his spare time. These days the tinkering runs to tech: I've spent the last ten or twelve years deep in big data, machine learning, and AI, running home-lab projects that either turn into something that makes money, makes life easier, or just makes me happy. I also volunteer on the TechOps crews at MomoCon and Dragon Con, two of Atlanta's big conventions. Most of what comes out of the home lab ends up written up here on the projects page.