About

I’m Erik Olson. I’m a web systems engineer living in Tennessee, by way of the world, having spent the first 15 years of my life growing up as a TCK overseas. My first computer ran MSDOS 6.0 and it stayed that way for the longest time because Windows 3.1 was just wrong. Prior to high school most of my programming experience involved writing BASIC on my TI-83, that is until some of my friends convinced me to help them with their fan site about their favorite TV series. When they brought me in they were hand coding the HTML for every episode page, I figured there had to be a better way, and with the help of some PHP and MySQL documentation, I ended up creating my first CMS.

Since then I’ve been fascinated by information and the ways that it can be manipulated and utilized as well as the systems which make that possible. Specifically, how those systems work and how they can be broken. I find that approaching system design with the mindset of “how can I break this” leads to a more secure system (obviously) as well as one that is more efficient and stable. It forces you to continuously reevaluate your assumptions and in the process learn something more about the tools you are using.

Currently my interests include web systems design and integration, API development, and information security. Some of my favorite projects that I’ve worked on are the Legion Web Services Framework, the Horde Distributed Windows Services Manager, and the myD-H Patient Portal. I love designing systems that not only solve the current problem, but also mitigate or entirely prevent the next problem down the road while at the same time providing an excellent experience for our users.

Outside of work I enjoy hiking, reading, photography, good (bad) movies, and messing around with my home automation system.