Find out what people are saying about Jared:
“I’ve had the good fortune of speaking with Smith for every Fedora release during his tenure and was always impressed with his depth of knowledge and insight into what really matters – both at Fedora and for the Linux world as a whole. … I will certainly miss the deep technical conversations about things big and small that I have had with Smith over the last year and half and I wish him well in whatever role he lands next.” (Sean Michael Kerner, Internet News
What does it take to lead a popular open source Linux distribution? Ask Jared Smith, the new project leader at Fedora, and he’ll tell you that the focus needs to be on the community. (Internet News: New Fedora Linux Leader to Focus on Community)
Smith’s vision for Fedora is about ensuring that the Fedora community is an inclusive place where multiple views and contributions are welcome. (CIOUpdate.com : New Fedora Linux Project Leader Building More Than a Distro)
You [Jared Smith] seem to have a fairly corporate background, first managing a large Linux network for an Internet traffic auditing company (Omniture), and then managing training, documentation, and community relations for an enterprise telephony systems integrator (Digium). … You seem to be a very civic-minded guy, active in a local LUG, scouting, and church choir. (Linux.com: Interview with new Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith)
Jared also brings a wealth of of both technical and community relations expertise … as an instructor, lecturer, and training department manager. (RedHat press release: Introducing Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith June 6, 2010)
It is with a mixture of pride and sorrow that I share the news that long-time Digium employee and Asterisk community member Jared Smith is leaving Digium to become the Fedora Project Leader, employed by Red Hat. Jared has contributed to the Asterisk community for the better part of a decade, and has worked tirelessly for the last few years at Digium in community relations and training roles. I’m confident that he will remain engaged with Asterisk — he assures me he’ll be at Astricon in October — but it will be a challenge to find such a capable and committed colleague to take his place within the ranks of Digium. We wish Jared all the best in his new role, and we’re confident he’ll do well there. We’ll certainly miss him here.(Digium Blog : Digium’s Fond Farewell to Jared Smith July 6, 2010)
I highly recommend the http://www.digium.com/en/training/courses/#advanced course. I took it a couple years ago with Jared Smith who was one of the authors of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony http://cdn.oreilly.com/books/9780596510480.pdf and Digium’s lead trainer. It was a great course and i would highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about Asterisk. (The Ethical Hacker Blog Post comment: VOIP abuse project)
Jared really knows Asterisk inside and out and is able to give insights into the program, and why it works the way it does. In addition, he is a really good teacher. He can take the subject, make it interesting, and give good examples of why you would use a feature, and how best to implement it. (Televoip Blog : Asterisk Advanced Training Class — My Thoughts)
As a long time Asterisk user, contributor, and evangelist, he has spent the last several years helping the Asterisk community. Jared is a dynamic and knowledgeable instructor with several years of experience in leading various Asterisk training classes. (Asterisk 1.4 : The Professional’s Guide by Colman Carpenter, David Duffett, Nik Middleton, and Ian Plain, Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.)
Jared Smith gave a nice talk and demo of Asterisk … What impressed me the most was how easily Jared wrote some code to add functionality to an Asterisk server. The Asterisk language he used reminded me of early BASIC and FORTRAN. With just a few lines he set up a simple telephone menu. (Selmys Blog : 3 Barcap Sessions at Fudcon 11)
Big Nerd Ranch, Inc. announced today the newest addition to its line-up of classes, Asterisk Bootcamp, November 6-10, 2006. Asterisk Bootcamp, taught by instructor Jared Smith and developed by Sokol & Associates …
The innovative bootcamp highlights the instruction prowess of Asterisk guru and author, Jared Smith. Jared is the Senior Consultant and instructor for Sokol & Associates and the creator of the IAX2 trunking technique. He is featured as a co-author of the seminal Asterisk text, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, and one of the co-creators of the Asterisk Docs project.
“When you’re dealing with emerging technologies, finding the right instructor with the requisite experience and street credentials to teach a class can be challenging,” said Aaron Hillegass, Big Nerd Ranch founder. “Having someone with the knowledge base, reputation, and vigor of Jared Smith is like winning the lottery. His finger has been at the pulse of Asterisk design almost since its inception, and his ability to translate his knowledge into practical instruction for students is an incredible asset.” (PRWeb.com: Big Nerd Ranch, Press Release August 31, 2006)
From Sokol & Associates Website:
Jared Smith is a systems engineer, network engineer, developer and all-around Asterisk guru. He is co-author of O’Reilly’s Asterisk: The Future of Telephony as well as the creator of IAX2 trunking. Source
From SineApps:
“A couple of notable speeches were Jared Smith’s speech on voice recognition and text to speech…
“Jared spoke about the new speech recognition integration in the latest versions of the Asterisk Business Edition … Jared had a pleasant manner of speaking which also made it enjoyable for my partner, who came with me and knew very little about Asterisk.” (SineApps.com – Asterisk Daily News and VoIP Services: Astricon Paris Write Up, June 27, 2006)
Alec Saunders
“The final talk of the day, Jared Smith’s talk on Voice Recognition and Text to Speech, was great. He showed us how, using LumenVox, you could easily create robust voice rec applications. … Then he used Cepstral to do text to speech, which was also very exciting.” (Alec Saunders – Astricon 2006)
Tim O’Reilly, owner O’Reilly Media:
(The following quote is the article that resulted from Jared’s suggestion here to Tim O’Reilly that he do a study on books that are released under liberal licenses, like Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, and are available for free download.)
As part of our continued effort to understand the impact on book sales of the availability of free downloads, I wanted to share some data on downloads versus sales of the book Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, by Leif Madsen, Jared Smith, and Jim Van Meggelen, which was released for free download under a Creative Commons license.
Jeremy McNamara of nufone.net, which operates one of the mirrors, provided us with download stats, which we were then able to compare with book sales. Our goal of course, is to help publishers understand whether free downloads help or hurt sales. The quick answer from this experiment is that we saw no definitive correlation, but there is little sign that the free downloads hurt sales. More than 180,000 copies were downloaded from Jeremy’s mirror (which is one of five!), yet the book has still been quite successful, selling almost 19,000 copies in a year and a half. This is quite good for a technical book these days — the book comes in at #23 on our lifetime-to-date sales list for the “class of 2005” (books published in 2005) despite being released at the end of September. You might argue that the book would have done even better without the downloads, especially given the success of asterisk and the importance of VoIP. But it’s also the case that the book is far and away the bestseller in the category, far outperforming books on the same subject from other publishers.
From O’Reilly Radar: Free Downloads vs. Sales: A Publishing Case Study
From O’Reilly Media:
Jared Smith is a long time member of the Asterisk community, and a co-founder of the Asterisk Documentation Project. Jared has over a decade of systems administration and programming experience, along with several years of professional telephony and voice-over-IP experience. As the architect of one of the world’s largest Asterisk installations, he has a wealth of hands-on Asterisk knowledge. (Source: O’Reilly Media)
Jared Smith is one of those rare individuals whose beloved hobby is the same as his profession. The son of a computer store owner, Jared wrote his first computer program at the age of 7 on his Commodore 64. The obvious choice of major for this geek-in-embryo was Computer Engineering, and Jared received his Bachelor of Science degree with a minor in Computer Science from Utah State University. He now has over a decade of professional systems administration and programming experience in the simulation, market research, and web analytics industries. As a key architect of one of the world’s largest Asterisk installations, Jared has a wealth of hands-on telephony and VoIP knowledge, which he shares through users groups and various public speaking engagements. He is an active member of the Asterisk community and a co-founder of the Asterisk Documentation Project.
Jared is active in his community, donating Asterisk services to local schools and serving in his church. The greatest joy in Jared’s life comes from spending time with his children, , and his wife, Jenny. From Asterisk: The Future of Telephony
, published by O’Reilly Media, September 2005
From the Astricon 2004 program:
“Jared Smith is a Linux systems administrator with several years of telephony and oice-over-IP experience. While working for a previous employer, he rolled out one of the world’s largest Asterisk installations. That installation alone saved the company $20,000 (USD) a month, and paid for itself in less than five months. Jared is also responsible for inventing a feature in Asterisk known as ‘IAX2 trunking’, allowing concurrent calls between two Asterisk installations to minimize IP overhead, and thus increase the number of simultaneous calls over a particular link. Jared has also been instrumental in creating the infrastructure for the Asterisk Documentation Project. He is an active participant in the project and has written
a good portion of current edition.”Source: Astricon 2004 Conference Archives
Here is the Astricon Power Point Presentation
DISCOVERY
RESEARCH GROUPJanuary 29, 2004
To Whom It May Concern:
It is with pleasure that I write this letter of recommendation for Jared Smith, with whom I worked at Discovery Research Group for approximately 20 months.
During that period of time, I was president of the company and Jared was a member of our infrastructure team. The infrastructure team was tasked with the project of completely rebuilding the technical infrastructure of the entire company.
Jared possesses the rare talent of being able to operate simultaneously in the technical world and in the business world. He is able to discuss complex technical matters with anyone, and is also able to frame the discussion in terms of benefit to the company.
Jared also exhibited the ability to work well with every group of stakeholders, including our client base, vendors, other employees and executives.
I will miss working with Jared on a professional level, but also on a personal level. I would hire Jared again without hesitation if given an opportunity.
Please feel free to contact me if I can answer further questions.
Michael Lundberg, President
6975 Union Park Center, Suite 450,
Salt Lake City, UT 84047
800-678-3748 or 801-569-0107
FAX 888-233-1269www.drgutah.com
June 22, 2001To Whom It May Concern:
Jared Smith has worked with me at Visionary Products, Inc. for about the last two years while he attended Utah State University. His primary duties were system administration, database administration, and web application developer. During the last few months, Jared has also been involved in embedded systems development, including hardware and firmware development.
Jared’s system administration skills are among the best around. He has an in-depth knowledge of UNIX (especially Linux) and Windows server administration, including account maintenance, security, Internet services, and backup. Jared is also able to quickly research and expand his administration skills when the need arises.
As a database and web application developer, Jared setup our databases servers, both Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL and implemented numerous web-based graphical user interfaces using PHP to access the databases.
Jared’s C programming, assembly language knowledge, and electrical and computer engineering education make him a good fit for firmware and embedded system development.
Jared also gets along well with others and has no problem communicating effectively.
In all, Jared is very likely to be a great part of your team!
Sincerely,
Paul Hepworth
VP EngineeringEmail: paulh@visionaryproducts.com
To Whom It May Concern:The purpose of this letter is for recommending Jared Smith for employment. I was his supervisor, during which time he proved to have many skills, which I valued greatly. We had many challenging problems and time schedules that required excellent problem solving skills as well as the ability to work under pressure. He was able to meet those challenges, and his suggestions and solutions proved to be sound. His motivation and awareness for doing what needed to be done was appreciated, I never had to “micro-manage” Jared. He was always willing to research and learn about the things that he didn’t know, thus I know he has the ability to adapt to various positions that he may not currently have expertise in at this time. He is easy to work with and was a valued employee. I have no doubt that he will be a great asset to your organization.
Feel free to call or email me to discuss any other questions you may have about this recommendation.
Yours truly,
Allan Lundberg
Director of Software Development
CIS (County Information Systems)Phone: (435) 752-2750
Email: alworking@home.com
June 22, 2001To Whom It May Concern:
This letter is to introduce and recommend Mr. Jared Smith and to give an idea of Jared’s duties while employed at Utah State University Resource Recovery Services. Jared worked for a period of approximately 1 1/2 years in our Surplus Sales operation and during that time had the opportunity to receive a good deal of hands-on training and experience.
During the period of a year our operation typically receives several hundred excess (or surplus) computers that are turned in for sale or salvage. Jared’s job as a computer repair technician involved the receipt, analysis and processing of these computers. He honed his decision-making skills by doing an initial analysis on each unit to determine whether or not the unit was worth further processing. Units that were deemed to not be worth repairing were salvaged for useable parts and then recycled by private sources for scrap value.
Once Jared performed the initial sort then the real work of refurbishing the units began. I come to rely on Jared’s judgment and integrity as he undertook only the units that he was certain would recover the costs associated with the repair and refurbishing. He dealt with a large variety of units all the way from main or mini frame units to pc’s of every shape and size along with a good deal of peripheral equipments such as printers, modems, cards, etc….
Jared did an outstanding job and his technical skills increased greatly during his time with us.
In addition to his technical skills; Jared worked well with people and was liked and respected by his co-workers. I found him to be most responsive and willing to do whatever was asked even when the request was outside of his normal duties. Jared is customer-oriented and paid a good deal of attention to the art of pleasing his customers.
In summary, I would highly recommend Jared to be considered for a wide variety of job applications. He learned many of his skills as a young man helping his father in a home computer repair business and this type of work just seems
to come naturally for him. He is dependable and seems well-adjusted in his personal and home life.I will be happy to visit in person and/or address any issues not covered above.
Sincerely,
G. Kevin Phillips, Manager
Utah State University Resource Recovery
Phone: (435) 797-1973email: kevinp@fac.usu.edu
