Hi there, my name is Jon Erling. I’m 37, from Norway 🇳🇴
I grew up before the internet was a common thing in households. The family acquired our first computer when I was about 10 and at shortly after I was hooked, first few years was focused on different games.
Around when I was 14 I went through Confirmation (which was very normal at the time) and as part of it I received some money as gifts. With this I was able to build my very own computer and it also was around this time ADSL started becoming a thing.
I spent a lot of time on IRC using the mIRC client which had a rather simplistic scripting language with a built-in editor. This was my first real entry into programming.
My programming interests expanded to HTML, PHP and JavaScript.
Although these were my main interests, I also really liked mechanical work, and I started studying to become a mechanic / welder. During this time and to about mid/late 20s, my programming interests was slowly reduced as adult life started kicking in. After my studies I was drafted for 1 year military service.
After the military service, I started looking for work and for about 4 years I worked as a manufacturing engineer producing the machines which creates foam for chair, mattress etc. The work involved lathing, milling, welding etc. At the end of this period I unfortunately started developing migraine which lasted for days on end and had to find something else to work with.
I then started working in telecom, mainly as a seller. After a few years of this, I started to find it boring and started studying with the idea of going through Bachelor of Engineering with the goal of Cybernetics. During this time I also decided to try to search for another job and shortly after I did get a job with a large international marine satellite communication company as a Support Coordinator.
With this I started learning about a how satellite communication worked what what could and could not be done with the limitation of these kinds of networks. After about 3 years within support, I managed to get picked up by the engineering department after showing some software tools I’ve made for assisting myself and my support team in their daily work. These ranged from:
- Simple web sites for gathering information about the system the engineer was working on.
- A tool for automating the provisioning a new system on an already archaic and restricted software package. The original provisioning was manually typed in on multiple systems to give the end node access to the different coverage zones in the world.
One of my first projects I started working on within the engineering team was a way to gather information from all systems onboard vessel all over the world. Trying to do this with the bandwidth and latency limitations towards thousands of nodes was a really interesting and challenging task and it really pushed my knowledge and will to learn further.
Unfortunately not many years after I started in this position I started developing heaps of anxiety and depression which had been building over the years and not long after I had to go on sick leave which still is active to this day. I managed for a period to work at 50% efficiency, but this dropped to 0% at the end of last year (2021).
For most of my life I’ve been an anxious person so in a way it was inevitable. Although anxiety and depression can be hell it can also be a good thing if a somewhat decent support system is present (I’m glad I have access to Norways health system). I decided not long after I got the diagnosis that I wanted to be as open as possible about both my symptoms and experience with it to try to reduce the stigma around it.
In the past year, I’ve tried to bring by focusing on different Hobbies including programming and with this also try to give back to different open source projects where I can. I also wanted to start writing in a blog-ish kind of way as that is something I never tried before, as I mainly have kept to myself.
If you got all the way this far, thank you for reading my little story and hope you might want to come back at a later date. 🤗