About Jason

Jason Lengstorf is a tv producer, entrepreneur, educator, and creative technologist. He’s the creator of CodeTV, which produces original series made for a developer audience.

Professional life

Jason is the founder of CodeTV, and the creator and executive producer of Web Dev Challenge, Leet Heat, Web Lunch, and other original series. He got his start in production while working as the VP of Developer Experience at Netlify.

He started his career as a freelance web developer, growing his freelance practice into a web agency called Copter Labs before selling his ownership stake in 2014.

He joined IBM as a frontend architect working on IBM Cloud, where he discovered open source and developer education.

He later joined Gatsby as a principal engineer, and turned his focus to building and nurturing the open source community. His influence on how companies approach developer community was noticeable, with many companies adopting practices pioneered by Jason and his team at Gatsby.

During his time at Gatsby, Jason started livestreaming, eventually settling on a format that would become Learn With Jason: a 90-minute live pair programming series. This format was widely influential on developer relations and influencers across the tech industry, with many dev advocates mimicking the format for their own streams.

When Jason was recruited at Netlify, he continued experimenting with community building and video production. Originally led by Sarah Drasner until she took a new job and put Jason in charge, Netlify’s developer experience team pioneered several novel approaches to community building in tech, and was frequently held up as the best example of what a developer experience team should be.

Jason’s vision for building community and developer education at scale was to create “tv for developers”. After several unsuccessful attempts to start it as an internal initiative, Jason left Netlify and went full-time on CodeTV (originally called Learn With Jason) in 2022.

Today, Jason works with tech companies of all sizes to create original, entertaining programming that teaches developers new skills in a fun, collaborative way. His primary objective is to make tech feel more playful, welcoming, and fulfilling.

In addition to his work at CodeTV, he’s also a keynote speaker and occasional consultant.

Find out more about working with Jason on the CodeTV website.

Personal life

Jason lives in Portland, OR with his wife, Marisa Morby. He’s into cooking, hosting dinner parties, hunting the best bars and restaurants in the city, traveling (also to eat).

He grew up in Montana, and learned most of his professional skills by being in a band that wasn’t good enough to make money, therefore forcing him to either learn how to do something (e.g. book a tour, build a website, design merch and tour posters, convince teenagers to hang up concert posters around town) or give up.

Jason reads a lot, does his best to dress fashionably, and loves nothing more than a long, winding, philosophical conversation with curious people.

He’s active on a handful of social media platforms, which you can find on Jason’s external links page.