Jon Ericson

jon@jlericson.com | jlericson.com

Complicated systems fascinate me. Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to programming. In college I studied non-deterministic atmospheric models. I operated a supercomputer cluster before computation became a commodity. Nothing compares in complexity to humans interacting with each other, however.

OpenSSL Foundation

Communities Manager | January 2025–Present

My mandate is to expand the OpenSSL ecosystem so that it remains a reliable way to secure communications and keep private data private.

I write for the OpenSSL Foundation blog, the OpenSSL Library blog and other places where I can reach people who might be interested in OpenSSL. I present policy changes, describe esoteric code updates, seed SEO/AEO posts, exploit minor holidays to explain cryptography basics, and boil down highly technical topics so that my mom understands them.

I speak about OpenSSL project whenever I can. My favorite talks so far:

The Foundation management team is small, so we all do a little of everything. I conducted a survey of OpenSSL users, produced a post-quantum board game, manage community governance, edit numerous internal documents for the rest of the team, mentor students in the NC State Secure Computing Institute (SCI), and generally pick up tasks that need doing.

Game Designer

Civitas

Founder | June 2021–Present

Using my experience as a community manager and a programmer, I help clients get the most out of their community software. While working at EnterpriseDB, I created a part-time community consulting company so that my community management skills wouldn’t get rusty. I now work full-time with clients using Discourse, the best forum software around.

  • I imported 2.4 million posts from the Bullshido archive from a MySQL database to the active Discourse forum. Along the way, I contributed changes that handled various data problems to the open source import script.
  • Rebel Capitalist forum needed to send emails to subscribers who wanted to get investment advice right to their inbox. While configuring that, I discovered a problem with their MemberPress subscription service and provided a solution.
  • Evans Mechanical Services Inc needs a contact form that works well on mobile devices and sends emails to employees when a new contact is submitted. I built a Discourse plugin that does just that.
  • College Confidential is setting up a premium membership model to help pay hosting costs and I’m managing the implementation.

Game Designer

I’ve designed two card games:

Rules writing, as it turns out, requires precision similar to writing code, but also needs to be at least somewhat engaging to humans. Play-testing followed by edit passes are crucial to the process.

I returned to College Confidential in order to unlock the potential of the community for a new owner. The theme for this stretch was stabilization. With several changes in ownership, College Confidential felt the effects of changes in strategy. My work was both social and technical.

EnterpriseDB

Developer Advocate | April 2021–June 2022

I worked with EDB’s documentation team to help them produce excellent documentation in order to give people confidence they will be successful. For many developers deciding on which software to recommend for purchase, online documentation is the first place they check. Too many companies ignore the value of documentation for marketing and lead generation.

College Confidential

Community & Site Operations Manager | January 2020–March 2021

I evaluated a mature community, proposed next steps (including migrating to Discourse) and worked with the entire company to revive the CC community. I became the community dynamics and software expert for the company. Product managers, developers and designers consulted with me about how to manage the forum software. In addition, I managed a small team of community specialists.

Among my accomplishments:

Freelance technical blog writer

Fixate IO | August 2016

I wrote two freelance posts, including “When a Crisis Hits, Who Manages the Managers?” for PagerDuty. It was enjoyable work but not profitable since each post required considerable research and didn’t pay particularly well.

Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange

Community Product Manager | July 2013–January 2020

I learned how to cultivate diverse communities and mentor community leaders. With 176 Q&A sites, Stack Exchange was a perfect laboratory for understanding how online communities thrive or decay. Even though I had “manager” in my title, the work was more like planning and tending a garden. It required both strategic vision for the entire network and tactical execution for mentoring, mediation, and communicating change.

I worked on several major projects, including:

JPL/Raytheon

Technical Lead | June 2001–August 2013

I was part of a team that designed and implemented the Science Investigator-led Processing System to process Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer algorithms. From launch in the summer of 2004 through its end of life in 2018, the ground data system received a constant stream of data that needed to be stored on tape, converted into interferograms, spectra, vertical profiles and, finally, global maps for a variety of atmospheric properties. As a result, I managed a high-performance computer system that produced more than a terabyte of data each month.

Systems Engineer | June 1999–April 2001

During the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, I was part of the ground support team. Both before and after the mission, I helped design and test the software that formatted the radar data to produce 3-dimensional maps of the Earth’s surface. During the mission, I monitored communication with the astronauts and waited for downloaded samples of instrument data, which was quickly processed in order to provide images for the press. I was responsible for the demux step. I also designed a simple report to help my colleagues anticipate the next downlink slot.

National Weather Service/Hughes

Programmer | Summers 1994–1997

As a summer intern, I was asked to code an algorithm that converted one-minute sensor output into hourly reports of cloud heights and coverage for the Automated Surface Observing System. Over the course of the next three summers I took on algorithm development, design and coding for serial devices, configuration management, weather observation, and database management.

UCLA

Atmospherics Sciences | May 1999

One of my favorite classes required me to learn FORTRAN in order to build atmospheric models. A math class introduced me to Mathematica. I learned the SPSS statistics software from a cultural anthropology class. As much as possible, I took history and philosophy electives. This is also when I entered the world of online communities via Usenet.