Posts on Jason Koppe

Climbing Safety Skill Practice

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:55:47 -0500

For me, climbing movement has come more intuitively than climbing safety systems. But, both are required for a fun AND safe time on rock. 12 years in, and the safety systems knowledge I’ve gained has started to snowball: it seems like I’m learning safety system skills a little faster now, with a lot less overwhelm than in the beginning.

This post is about the climbing safety systems. And more specifically, practicing them. I’ve been practicing safety systems since the very beginning, but ramping up in technical complexity as I ventured from bouldering to sport to multipitch to multipitch trad. And, I’ve learned many ways:

Climbing Fear Getting Started

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0500

I try to stay living. So, as I began climbing outside and starting to leave the ground where falls had actual consequences, I found myself getting nervous.

My first leads in and around Austin weren’t nerve-wracking. In fact, my first two serious falls I was oblivious, or at least naive.

In my first multipitch, being so high off the ground was unnerving. And, what freaked me out more than that was doing my first rappel. Desperately wanting enough friction in my device, I wrapped my Figure 8 with the rope. Being the newer climber, I had to rappel second. So I left the cliff edge by myself for the first time, and leaning over the edge was frightening. But, luckily, I was going down slowly - for I had too many wraps on my Figure 8 :) Pretty soon I realized that my Figure 8 was annoyingly tight and my arms were fatiguing from pulling the device down through the turns of the rope. But, I made it down. And, while I was nervous, I also had a grand day on the rock with a friend. Why was this so freaky?

How I'm Learning Trad Climbing

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:31:02 -0600

I’ve been learning to trad climb for nearly as long as I’ve been climbing. I’m still learning about trad, gaining experience in trad, and refining my practices. I will be forever.

I didn’t start climbing with trad climbing. I started with bouldering and then pretty quickly got into leading sport climbing.

Below is my joyous climbing learning journey with many many lessons from helpful mentors and numerous don’t-do-it-this-way mistakes including a few minor-to-moderate injuries.

How to Be Better, Together

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 08:15:27 -0600

(Originally published May 17, 2021 on learningfromincidents.io; a blog about how software engineering organizations were adopting strategies from other industries like power management, mass transit, healthcare, etc to investigate and learn from accidents.)

I think that some of the approaches that I have used to get better at mountain climbing can be applied to software engineering with a similar effect.

Discuss every day work

My climbing partner and I have a practice at the end of each climbing day: we talk about the day. This started as a way to spend our post-climb waking hours productively by persisting the experiences in our memory. We often have multiple hours of hiking, traveling, and/or resting before sleep. We start by verbally describing as many details as possible, riffing off of each other as we go, sometimes asking probing questions. We talk about the turns on the hike in, as many nuances of the climb that we can remember, how we were feeling during parts of the climb (nervous, tired, engrossed, etc), what we liked, what worked well, what was hard (we’ve both described how following – not leading – can seem much more challenging and scary), what mistakes we made, what workarounds we employed, what risks we took, what we’d do differently if we repeated the day, what could have been worse, etc. If it happened today, it could happen tomorrow.

Garden 2025

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 08:53:00 -0500

This is a post about how I’ve been getting into gardening, plants, biodiversity, and conservation.

Some background

I mentioned in 2023, that I had been wanting to spend more time outside, and in particular, gardening. This is partially an intuitive thing: it feels nice, rewarding, and literally awesome to be outside observing, learning about, and beginning to understand natural processes and their interactions. It’s also a logical thing: I’ve listened to a lot of www.thegreatsimplification.com over the last few years, learning about biophysical limits to economic growth, climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, plastics, etc etc etc and a way that I can see to respond to the myriad challenges described in the podcast is to get outside, gain knowledge and skills outside, meet and help others who want to do the same.

Climbing Trip Gear

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 21:17:23 -0500

I have an upcoming trip with some new-to-trad climbing friends, so I wanted to share some info about gear and packing lists.

I’m new to trad, what do I need?

As a new-to-trad climber, you’ll be following, so you won’t need as much gear as the leader yet. But, you do need gear to climb up, rappel down, and perform basic self-rescue like ascending and belaying/rappelling without a device. To learn safety skills for climbing including some basic self-rescue, see Climbing Safety Skill Practice.

Poem: Undoing

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 08:30:10 -0500

On the fence line it grew

Coming anew, coming anew

I’d cut it down to size

I hadn’t yet opened my eyes

I eventually shifted gears

And started undoing all of the years

I was starting to see

More diversity

In the Greenhill

Was such a thrill

To be curious, unsure and learning

The Zizotes was deep and broad and old

And broke as I told

My booted shoe

To dig right through

Climbing Trip Report: Gunks 2024

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 16:16:00 -0600

This is a report about my October 2024 trip with a focus on climbing in The Gunks in New York. The leaves were falling during this trip - and, new to me, it seemed as though leaves might the inspiration for butterflies. Multiple times I’d be overlooking a beautiful vista to notice a fluttering specimen in the wind. In October in Austin, these flutterers are butterflies dancing in the air, harvesting the pollens and nectars - the leaves don’t fall til later. However, in Gardiner, NY at this time, the air dancers were leaves. I wondered: did leaves give ideas to butterflies on how to move around?

Climbing Trip Report: Joshua Tree 2024

Sat, 04 May 2024 07:54:01 -0500

This is a report about a climbing trip to Joshua Tree National Park in April and May 2024. We camped and climbed trad for 4 days in beautiful weather.

Joshua Tree National Park West Entrance Sign

My hope for this story is that climbers may be able to leverage some insights within and apply lessons during their climbing experiences. Non-climbers may also enjoy getting to know my world a little more even though it’s primarily a story about climbing.

Climbing Trip Report: Red Rocks - Ascending Epinephrine

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 13:39:00 -0600

This post is a story about a climbing trip that Luke and I went on to Red Rock just outside of Las Vegas in 2023 to attempt to finish Epinephrine (Epi). For an intro and to our first two scouting sessions on Epi, see https://www.jasonkoppe.com/posts/climbing-trip-report-epi-1-and-2/. I won’t go into the details of that trip here, but suffice it to say that we didn’t ever finish Epi on our first two attempts - nor did we think we would - but one of the attempts was … more influential than the other. So, if you’re a intrigued, make sure to check out that post.

Climbing Trip Report: Red Rocks - Scouting Epinephrine

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 08:41:23 -0600

This post is a story about two climbing trips that Luke and I went on to Red Rocks just outside of Las Vegas in 2022 to prepare for an eventual climb of Epinephrine, the famous 5.9 in Red Rocks. We made progress on our climbing goals, did some scouting, changed plans numerous times, were involved in multiple accidents, one of us got a moderate injury and, of course, we had fun. Some of the accidents led to much reflection and discussion, and some of them became awesome stories of climbing at its finest. I first drafted this story in January 2023 as one of many steps I took personally to process the second trip. The story sat for a year while I finished work at Indeed and settled into post-Indeed time. In January 2024, I picked it back up with some light editing and final touches. My hope for this story is that climbers may be able to leverage some insights within and apply lessons during their climbing experiences. Non-climbers may also enjoy getting to know my world a little more even though it’s primarily a story about climbing.

Rekindling the proverbial village: asking for help

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 07:50:48 -0600

We were hosting a potluck with family and I was in charge of cooking the standing rib roast (aka prime rib). It was my first time cooking this dish which is popular in the USA at this time of year. Leading up to the cooking day, we researched portion sizes and cooking approaches. Beforehand, we decided not to bother with frenching the ribs since it seemed more cosmetic than practical and to skip tying the ribs since we didn’t have twine. As plans go, on cooking day I read that twine helped the rib cook more evenly, so I found myself asking my mom and a neighbor:

Getting off Google: Migrated the website

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 20:00:00 -0500

I migrated my website from Google to Hugo on Cloudflare.

If you were subscribed to RSS, you probably need to resubscribe to the new RSS.

From:

Google Sites (WYSIWYG website creation) - Basic info
Google Blogger (WYSIWYG blog publishing) - Blog
Google Docs - Drafting blog posts
Google Domains - Registrar + DNS

To:

Hugo, a static site generator
- Able to combine the site and blog together with Hugo’s flexibility
- Using the Poison theme for Hugo
- Used https://pypi.org/project/blogger-to-hugo/ and https://github.com/palaniraja/blog2md to migrate the content from Blogger to Hugo
vim and git
- Used locally to draft content
Cloudflare free tier
- Using DNS, Registrar, Pages, Redirects
- Using Pages Wrangler to upload hugo-generated content to Cloudflare from Terminal

This is one more step towards reducing my reliance on Google. Earlier steps include

I left Indeed

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 12:46:00 -0500

My last day at Indeed was Friday, March 10. I spent about 14 of my 36 years there, approximately 40% of my life. It’s been a fun ride! I’ve grown so much during my time at Indeed, in large part because of the amazing people that I got to learn from. I cherish the friendships that I’ve developed through these years and will continue to grow them. I consider myself lucky to have joined Indeed, and I feel grateful for being a part of growing a company with a socially-oriented mission of helping people get jobs. I am excited for the next phase in my life, equipped with lessons from these years of growth at Indeed.

Somatic Release Breathwork

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 07:44:00 -0500

I recently went through a private and individual Somatic Release Breathwork session with Dr Dave Cohodes in Austin, Texas. I was curious to try the session because:

I’ve had increased anxiety recently, so I’ve been trying to learn about anxiety, understand anxiety, and what contributes to mine.
After going through 3 years of talk therapy, being privileged to have months of EMDR and practicing meditation for over 5 years, I am a huge proponent of mental health therapies. It strikes me as odd that we learn about geometry and chemistry in childhood education but we don’t learn how to process our difficult life experiences. So, I am all for trying mental health practices, and this one was new to me.

Truth

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 07:29:00 -0500

I just finished Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. It’s a narrative of the history and legacy of residential schools in Canada which interleaves a multitude of stories, perspectives, and calls to action throughout. And while this approximately 300 page narrative is a summary of reality, it was eye opening for me.

I learned about colonialism, assimilation, racism, perseverance, and partnership.

Novelty, anxiety, growth

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 18:41:00 -0500

(~3500 words; reading time: 20 minutes)

How much of your life experiences are new-to-you novelty?

How do you balance optimism and pessimism while navigating novelty?

How do you notice anxiety?

Have you ever felt stuck?

Multiple experiences in the last few months have led me to reflect on the continuum of experience from routine to novelty. I’ll tell you a story for each:

Doing something new at work
A colleague taking a visible leap

Dream Team

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 22:35:00 -0600

Reading time: 30-40 minutes :)

Have you ever wanted to do something? Perhaps go to college. Or start a blog. Or pay off debt. Or climb a mountain. Or raise children. Or create and run a school in the Philippines. Or retire near a beach.

Have you ever made a todo list, a bucket list, new year resolutions, goal or (gasp) an objective with some key results? I’ve tried all of these, and probably more, to plan my future. My most recent iteration is:

Live and learn: sharing a practice of imprfection

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 09:21:00 -0600

I started this blog because I wanted to write more. Writing and sharing my writing help me clarify my thoughts and become a better communicator. Communication is one of our Dona-Koppe family values.

I have dreams to write about many different topics through this blog – personal, professional, concrete, abstract. In a flurry of new year energy, I recently brainstormed a list of about 30 blog posts. The list is both energizing and daunting. Some of the posts were finished quickly while others – like this one – took substantial time. Like everything in life, practice will make the process more efficient, more familiar, more intuitive.

Live and learn: valuing surprise

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 14:40:00 -0600

In 2015, on my first trip to Tokyo, Japan, a colleague referred me to The Secrets of Happy Families by Bruce Feiler. Bruce learns from soccer moms, self-help authors, investors, military vets, coaches, pastors, and software developers to coalesce an interesting array of strategies to improve organization, communication, education, and all of the other -tions that happen to make “happy” families. In a few words: adapt, talk, play & try. I enjoyed the book and learning about it was a pleasant surprise. I hadn’t expected to learn about a family book on my work trip.

Welcome

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 22:38:00 -0600

Welcome to my blog! I am Jason Koppe. I am a life-long learner, and want to write more. If you read this blog, you’ll learn more about me. And, maybe it will connect us even more. Welcome!

12.5 years ago, in June 2008, I started a blog – https://nssadoc.blogspot.com/ – which was focused around documenting the failures of computer systems. The idea was to counterbalance all of the happy path documentation I wrote in college. I felt like the documentation (always for posterity) was too narrow: documentation left out the sometimes messy and failure-laden journey towards accomplishing a task.