Jon lives in Chicago, IL and has more interests than hairs on his head. He has always been curious about how things work and why things are the way they are. Jon is a network engineer turned software developer who leads a small team building network-related software at ESnet.

His professional work has centered around IP networking, UNIX-like systems, and programming. His first years in UNIX system administration were at Wolfram Research where he was hired to do SQA but ended up with the root password instead. He spent many years at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, IL first as a student employee, then as a network engineer and finally as a senior network engineer. After NCSA, he joined ESnet at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as a network engineer. After several years focusing on network engineering at ESnet, Jon realized there was a need for network visualization and tooling and moved into developing software to meet these needs. Jon is the architect and lead developer of the MyESnet Portal.

He was very active with the SCinet committee of SC Conference Series. His involvement began in 1998 in Orlando, FL. He said he wouldn’t be involved again in 1999, but he hasn’t really managed to escape yet. He developed the software used to track all of the internal state for SCinet. This includes booth connection requests, fiber management, IP address allocation and DNS management. This system started as a Perl CGI script, but was then rewritten in Java using the Turbine framework which was in turn ported to Quixote and finally Django. In 2005 Jon was the Vice Chair of SCinet which was an interesting experience, but he decided he like doing hands on work more. These days Jon has largely escaped SCinet but still works on the interactive kiosk.

He has always had an interest in graphic design and visual communications and has dabbled in web design. In high school he was very involved in black and white photography. He is easily seduced by great design wherever it is found.

In the last several years he has become very interested in electronics and embedded systems. He has been exploring the AVR and ARM microcontroller platforms. He enjoys learning programming languages and has spent time learning Scala and Clojure recently with several others on his list.

Jon lives in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago with his wife and their meddlesome cat. Jon grew up in Glen Ellyn, IL. From 1990 until 2005 he lived in Champaign-Urbana, IL while attending college and working at NCSA. From 2005-2009, he lived in Seattle, WA. In 2009, he returned to Illinois and now lives in Chicago.

When he lived in Seattle, on many Saturdays you could find Jon at Saturday House. Saturday House was a unique and fun experience, but after a good run it came to an amicable end.

When not in front of a computer Jon enjoys creating things out of wood and other materials. He hopes to build an acoustic guitar from scratch one day, but for now he’ll be happy if he can find time to work in the workshop. He is also a pretty decent cook and enjoys preparing, talking about and, especially eating food.

Colophon

This site is built using Jekyll and Markdown and runs on the FreeBSD operating system. This colophon is the direct result of reading far too many books published by O’Reilly and Associates at an impressionable age. No bits were harmed during the creation of this site, however quite a few were rearranged.