Jon Thomas Stokkeland

Born in Norway, Moved to USA in 1999, lived in Western NY, PA, New England Area, Florida while travelling the US living on the road, and now Living in Western New York.

I have a degree in what was then (1993) called "Automation and Mechanics", but has later been named Mechatronics, and traditionally speaking is a form of Electrical Engineering.
31 Years of Professional experience, starting in electrical engineering (Automation/controls/robotics), and 25 years in IT Engineering, projects and management.

In the world of IT i've done the whole Geordi La Forge, from Netware to Kubernetes so to speak. The last few years very focused on Security/Infrastructure, VOIP/SIP, and Cloud; migrations and IAAS initially, and now successfully running SAAS operations deployed with Automation/DevOps. I am still maintaining my hands on skills and being the SME in many subjects, such as SIP/Asterisk and Networking, variety and challenges is what keeps IT fun...

I started in industrial process and production integration and monitoring, then moved into infrastructure and systems, then into software development and implementation in healthcare. It is very interresting how hobbies and for-fun projects turn into valuable experience over the years, like how could I have known in 2004 that the hobby project that started in my basement as a Physical Linux/Asterisk system with 2 FXO and 2 FXS ports, all virtual and SIP based by 2010, would later on, in 2013, be experience that I combined with my commercial Telecom-experience and could apply to a project of myself Architecting, Engineering, and supporting a VOIP/SIP system for commercial use, 10 years later the product is still alive and actively maintained by myself - with tens of thousands of users.

On the industrial/controls side I have worked on Anything from PLC/HMI projects with a few I/O, to larger distributed systems and production lines, from Relays to EtherIP, from DCS to NRT, and so forth. I do not anticipate going back to these roots, but my background experience in this area can be very useful in many situations.

I Believe my strength is the ability to see the overall picture and staying focused on the right details, troubleshooting and problem solving, and finding the balanace between path of least resistance versus the by-the-vendor-book solution. Understanding the business and applicable technology, a certain degree of overkill is needed to assure future ability and longviety, but you don't need a V8 to run a Mini Cooper.

My diplomatic/people skills, combined with my technical abilities, logical sense, and management experience, I know I could take on nearly any position within IT management. I do however have some requierements of my own; must be challinging, involve technology, general sense of humor amongst staff, and I need some hands on time. The perfect position would be running teams/departments doing operations and engineering of Telecom/SIP/Linux/Cloud based systems of sort .