A friend died last night. Jared Smith was many things to many people. He was Charleston’s weatherman. A colleague, a manager, and a mentor. A husband and a friend. Freakin’s dad.

In March of 2017, Jared and Curt Keisler took a chance on a green, 20-year-old programmer with barely a year of experience. I owe so much of my life and career to that decision, and to the two and a half years I spent under Jared’s wing at BoomTown.

Jared had a rare gift: he knew exactly how to give people the space to fail safely and the gentle direction they needed to actually grow. When one of my first major refactors, a frontend search experience serving millions of listings, took far too long and produced way more bugs than anyone bargained for, Jared didn’t lose faith or hover over my shoulder. He stayed patient and let me work through the problem.

He created an environment where we were trusted to figure things out for ourselves. I still think about an early mobile mapping project where I figured out how to sort nearby properties using simple triangle hypotenuses on a coordinate plane. Years later during a technical interview, I was tasked with writing a simple point-and-click animation engine: clicking would draw a dot at a given position, and a second dot randomly rendered elsewhere on the screen would have to smoothly track along the shortest path to the clicked point. What was the easiest way to do that? Triangles. That simple geometry trick got me that role.

The lessons I learned on his team have carried me through every chapter of my career since, often showing up when I least expect them. Whenever they do, I think of Jared.

We kept in touch from time to time over the years, though never enough. I am endlessly grateful for the time, trust, and kindness he showed me when we worked together. He was one of the most genuine people I have ever known, and I am going to miss him dearly.

I’ll think of him fondly every time I look up at the clouds.