We’re delighted to welcome Jason Abbott to the Gaia GPS engineering team.

Jason Abbott brings deep experience both with writing software, and Gaia GPS itself. Jason is a long-time user of Gaia GPS for Android, and you can read about his motorcycle adventures on his site, trailimage.com. You can also follow his technical blurbs by following @trailimage on Twitter.

Jason has a full-stack engineering background, and will help improve all facets of Gaia GPS, from gaiagps.com and the syncing back-end, to the iOS and Android apps. He started with us on President’s Day week, and in his first short week got through all of our technical setup, and shipped improvements to the website, including being able quickly load many thousands of waypoints – an outstanding bug that we were happy to see fixed.

Jason was raised on a small farm in the Idaho countryside, in the same house his mother grew up in and not far from his father’s childhood home, an area homesteaded by his great-great grandparents. He spent his youth exploring the Palouse Hills and nearby mountains.

He began writing software in high school and not long after, in about 1994, wrote a store catalog web site with Perl. He followed that path to create more and bigger things, such as a major west coast grocery commerce site and insurance fraud detection systems, always eager to understand and adapt to emerging best practices and toolsets. He is excited to work for a company who shares his value of the outdoors and who he expects will need him to make many product testing trips to the mountains.