This post is part of the Meet the ETCL Team series, which introduces the wonderful people who work in the lab and who have worked with us in the past.
Jon is the lab’s resident “server wizard” or, more officially, our Developer/Systems Administrator. He builds and maintains servers on Compute Canada’s infrastructure for our partners and their projects. He also does some development work creating custom sites in Drupal and WordPress.
Jon recently redesigned Iter Community, updating the design and migrating the servers to newer infrastructure. He’s also working on some Iter sites that are in development: one project involves some 11th–15th century Byzantine manuscripts and the other is Iter Press’s book catalogue.
Jon started coming to DHSI in 2011 and has been teaching courses since 2015. He is a PhD candidate in digital humanities at King’s College London, and initially came to the lab as a visiting researcher in the fall of 2017 to conduct research for his dissertation, for which Ray is one of his supervisors. His doctoral research involves an ethnographic study of the lab as well as research into its organizational structure and social media outputs.
Since Jon spends a lot of time working with servers, most of his work is done in the command line. No two days are quite the same—which is his favourite thing about working in the lab—but there is always daily maintenance to be done on the servers, such as checking for attempted security breaches, reviewing logs, and checking for and applying patches as needed. He also works on development projects, which involves creating, testing, and adjusting code. Some of his indispensable tools are iTerm, a terminal emulator, and Atom and Visual Studio Code both code editors.
When he’s not in the lab or working on his dissertation, Jon is active in a lot of computer security forums and volunteers at several hacking events. He also enjoys studying languages: he speaks French, German, Italian, and Norwegian, among others, and is currently learning Japanese.