James Konkler

You get someone who can take a messy technical problem, dig into it, and keep working until there is an actual solution.

Experience30 years

Based inThe Comox Valley, BC

FocusSolve. Improve. Simplify.

Work with James →Back to the team

How they show up

The work behind the title

James is senior infrastructure and systems engineer at IIAS, 30 years into this kind of work, based in the Comox Valley. The job is Linux, Windows, cPanel and WHM, and the hosting those sites sit on.

He troubleshoots websites, email, DNS, databases, and server issues. He handles migrations, upgrades, security, monitoring, and performance. When the ticket does not fit a category, that is usually still his ticket.

The useful version of “future oriented” is this: figure out why it is broken, then make it simpler so it stays fixed. Good technology should make things simpler, not more complicated.

Where the days go

What James actually works on

Hosting infrastructure
Troubleshooting
Migrations and security
DNS, email, and databases
Web applications

Off the clock

The human details

James will tell you YouTube is on in the background and coffee is non-negotiable. Then he mentions the fruit-fly trading experiment, and you realise the evening was not quiet.

What he just finished

He does not really finish books in a straight line. YouTube plays in the background while he works on the next problem. That is not a dodge. That is how the evening actually sounds in the Comox Valley.

What he does for fun

Cars, crypto, algorithmic trading, electronics, and embedded systems. If it has a motor, a board, or a model, he is probably in it. Fun, for James, still looks a lot like taking something apart until it makes sense.

What he cannot live without

Coffee and Cursor. One keeps him awake. The other is how the code gets written now. Pretty is not a feature, and neither is running out of either of those.

What he wanted to be as a kid

A marine biologist, until programming won. The ocean lost to a compiler, and he has not looked back. He still likes living things. He just likes solving them in software too.

What he is weirdly good at

Working on cars. Hands in an engine, same patience as a server that will not boot. If it is broken and someone else has already tried the obvious fix, James is usually still interested.

The most James thing

Crypto, probably. That is what people land on when they try to sum him up. The longer version is: he likes systems that keep moving, and he likes being the person who understands them.

The last rabbit hole

Training a fruit-fly brain to trade cryptocurrencies by turning market data into signals and stimuli for its neural network. He did not make that up for the form. That is an actual evening, and it tells you everything about how his brain rests.

Go-to fuel

Coffee. Again. There is a theme, and he is not fighting it. The next ticket is easier when the mug is full.

If he were not doing this

A hobby farmer. Dirt, weather, fewer tickets, and a problem you can walk out into. He would still be fixing things. The stack would just have more soil on it.

A hill he will die on

Good technology should make things simpler, not more complicated. He will die on that one at a keyboard, and he is right. If the tool needs a ceremony, it is not finished.

A little obsessed with

AI-driven algorithmic trading. The fruit fly was not a one-off. He is still in the question of whether a system can learn the market without making it worse.

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