About Me
My name is Jeff Stoner. Yes, my last name really is Stoner. No, I didn’t have a hard time in high school. In fact, I know of at least a dozen people named Stoner that have walked in those halls since I was in the 6th grade - two were my brothers and one is a good friend of mine (go figure, he sat beside me in home room for 6 years.)
I was born and raised in south western Pennsylvania in a blue collar family lifestyle. I attended Grove City College for 2 years where I struggled in electrical engineering classes - well, the analog stuff crushed me, I mastered digital logic. Dejected, I moved back in with my parents and transferred to a branch campus of the University of Pittsburgh, enrolling in the Information Science program.
I lasted 2 semesters, actually making good grades. Then, one day in December of 1998, I made an announcement that shocked my parents almost as much as myself: I decided to move to Pittsburgh and take charge of my fate.
I packed what little I owned and moved in with some friends in a real piece-of-shit house in Oakland. I landed a job as a student programmer with the recently-formed department, the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education. I worked hard and quickly became the go-to IT guy. It soon became apparent that classes were slowing me down so I stopped going and focused on computers (I’m very much a hands-on kind of learner.)
I was hired on full time with the department, manging all computer resources and helping with the University’s Blackboard system (formerly CourseInfo.) When Carl, the admin, left for greener pastures, I got handed the responsibility of managing all online courses for the University. Me.
I was one of the instructors for Blackboard classes for professors - a college drop-out teaching multi-degreed professors. The irony was fantastic. I loved it. It also taught me something: hard work, dedication and determination will win the day. I was in charge of me! I decided my life’s direction!
And so I did. I took a job with Blackboard, Inc. and moved to Alexandria, VA in March of 2000. I worked my way through the orginization, across both product suites until I got fed up with the place (well, certain aspects of it I won’t go into here and for NDA reasons.) I got a call from a recruiter looking to hire for a company out in Santa Clara.
Opsource, Inc. was the name, Software as a Service was the game. You hear about Web 2.0 in the media, well SaaS can be though of as ASP 2.0. This is my current employment home. I’m a Services Engineer - which means I build and maintain systems…a glorified systems administrator. I have some cool clients and do some fun work. It’s challenging but not impossible. Opsource allows me to work from home 100% of the time which allowed my wife and I to buy our first “real” home out in the stix (back to our red neck roots.)
