About Stephen Olesen

This is a page all about Stephen `slePP' Olesen. It starts off with a quick summary of skills and knowledge and then continues on with more of a biography. Enjoy reading!

A Quick Summary

Stephen Olesen, CTO of NetMonks, has experience with the following programming languages:

He also works with or knows the following operating systems:

Some of the non-computer related (and sometimes interrelated) items:

And now, if you're interested in the really long history (it gets vague from about the age of 14), continue reading.

In the Beginning...

Stephen `slePP' Olesen has been working with computers from the age of 5 years old. His first computer was a Commodore Vic 20 in 1986. This computer was nothing exceptionally fancy, but it began the cycle of learning which has continued to this day. The Vic 20 provided a BASIC programming language built into the operating system (in fact, that was pretty much all there was for an operating system). By the age of 7, Stephen was working on programming projects. These were primarily supported by books taken out of the Chester Ronning School library. Once the programs were started, he tended to take them further and toy around with the instructions to see what could be accomplished.

Within the collection of disks that still reside in his closet today, you can find a number of very early programs written by Stephen. They may not be impressive, but given his age, they might just be.

At around the age of 9, BASIC began to lose interest since a new computer had been purchased by his parents. This Tandy 1000SX was equipped with 640K of RAM and a 30MB RLL hard drive. With this, the BASIC programs started to show deficiencies in ability. So, due to a lucky course of events, he was able to pickup grade 12 texts on programming in Turbo Pascal v5.5. Pascal was quite different from the old fashioned BASIC. The way he learned most of the Pascal language was by reading the texts and doing the assigned problems before school, during school, and after school. In short time, he was writing graphical applications and programs dealing with three-dimensional geometry.

During the next few years, his programming continued, and as the world of the connected computer became more prevelant, a modem was purchased. With this modem, his software started to make its way into the world and he began to explore the world outside his room.

Moving On...

By the age of 12, and having moved through various editions of Turbo Pascal, again, Stephen grew bored with the challenges remaining to work with. This is the same time that the Internet entered his home. With a Hayes 2400 baud modem he would dial into the Augustana University College dialup service and connect into the VAX/VMS server. This was his first exposure to UNIX-like systems. This opened up a whole new world of things to explore and discover. With protocols like Gopher, Archie, and others, the exploration of the world started out.

The Internet...

Of course, at this age, the most attractive option was to meet other people and play around with games. He soon discovered a dislike for the popular games of the period, MUDs, he moved on to telnet-based talkers. These were basically MUDs without the gaming portion. His favourite, and a place still frequented, quickly became Foothills. Hours and hours were spent in front of the computer talking to people from around the world.

During this time, and due to exposure to a number of very intelligent people, his knowledge of computers, the Internet, programming and operating systems increased rapidly. Within about a year, he had signed on to work with two programming projects in C. One was a gaming server based in the United Kingdom, the other was his own talker, SlTC. The code for SlTC has since been mostly lost, since it was never quite finished, but to take its place SGen3 was formed. SGen3 has officially been released on the Internet.

C, Minix and Linux...

Learning C and UNIX operating systems came hand in hand. After spending hours downloading the Minix operating system, he installed it onto his fancy new 286 computer. Requiring very little space, but otherwise being fully featured, this was also the first foray into the open source software revolution. Having rid his computer entirely of Microsoft products, he was determined to learn everything he could about alternatives. It didn't take long for Minix to grow on him as a reliable system to use for development and general purpose computing. This is all back in the days before graphical computer was extremely popular, and so, Minix had everything one would need.

Since Minix is entirely written in C, it provided a very good basis to learn how to do general tasks and provided the kickstart to learning the language. By the age of 14, Stephen knew C quite well and was able to work on a number of projects with others, as well as developing a number of utilities and services for nothing more than the challenge.

By the age of 15, Linux was becoming popular, and so he decided to switch from Minix to Linux. Also, at this age, he managed to pick up a faster computer, a 486 DX/2. With a larger 350MB hard drive, he was able to install a basic distribution of Linux and really begin tinkering in the realm of advanced services programming and other languages.

Linux became the only operating system he ran on his personal computers and enabled him to learn more about the networking side of computers, as well as Internet services. By purchasing an unlimited dialup account from a service provider in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, he began serving websites from his personal computer within months of installing Linux. He also setup his own mail server and registered his first domain name, slepp.org. The name has long since expired, but it was replaced later on with the domain geeksanon.ab.ca. This was back when the .CA Registry was run by volunteers at universities and organizations around the country. Though the records show it wasn't registered until the year 2000, this is because they didn't maintain full records from registrations prior to the commercialization of the Canadian domain name registration.

Continuing Education...

So, with a domain in hand, and a server connected to the Internet at all times, the beginnings of real server design and setup began. This is possibly the fastest learning period of his life. During the next two years, he learned another 10 programming languages and 5 different operating systems. As each one was absorbed, it became easier to learn new things. These days, Stephen knows over 20 programming languages and has used over 30 operating systems.

Now, it comes time to talk about education. While all this was happening at home, his drive to attend school was fading. It was growing less challenging by the month and the course material was becoming more redundant. These are some of the reasons he has never completed high school or pursued any secondary education.

He left public school in the second half of grade 9 to take correspondance schooling. This worked well for the interesting subjects of Math and Science. The ones he found less interesting, such as Social Studies and Language Arts, went by the wayside and were never completed for grade 9.

By the start of grade 10, still having not completed grade 9, he began taking a virtual high school program provided by Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools. This provided him with an Apple PowerPC 75MHz computer. This was by far the fastest system he had ever used and was where he began to learn graphic design and three-dimensional rendering. Some of those renderings still exist in the archives.

However, this new computer brought distractions, and a lot of them. Again, the Math and Sciences were completed for the entire curriculum in under a week, but the rest of the courses were never finished. In the end, the official records show failing grades on all but one course of the first semester of grade 10.

With these failures in hand, his parents decided it would be best that he return to public school. He didn't agree, but really didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. At the start of the second semester of grade 10, he returned to Camrose Composite High School. However, in signing up, Stephen skipped a few courses which he felt would not be very interesting (including English 10, and others). So he began taking grade 11 courses earlier than usual.

Remaining in public school to the end of grade 12, he received high honours in Physics, Math, Calculus, and English. He never continued taking Social Studies after the 10 level. This alone is enough to not grant a diploma in Alberta, but a number of extra courses that he didn't see a need for were never taken.

Some of the other courses he took included three computer programming courses, where he tended to teach the other students, instead of doing the work. The computer courses also provided a great time to play multiplayer games such as DOOM II and Hexen. Acing all the courses was not at all difficult, but it provided him with a full enough course schedule to actually attend classes.

During this time span in school, he formed Geeks Anonymous as a small group of about 15 official members in school. Geeks Anonymous has been sticking around ever since and has no signs of going away.

And Life Draws Near...

There finally came the point where high school was finished, though not completed, and Stephen decided to move to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He was employed at a company doing server administration, programming and technical services for a short period of time. The job wasn't working out, so he moved on to work for Wise Decision Systems Ltd.. During his employment at Wise Decision Systems Ltd. for nearly 5 years, he learned a number of new programming languages and operating systems related to the clients he supported.

In May of 2003, he left Wise Decision Systems Ltd. to form a company with Mark Fossen called NetMonks (we figure that you knew that already). Since forming NetMonks, he has again expanded his horizons in software development and new technologies.

And Finally...

Stephen Olesen is now the Chief Technical Officer of NetMonks Consulting Corporation, and knows over 20 programming languages, 30 operating systems, 10 protocols in detail, and a lot of detail about a lot of hardware. He continues to learn more every day and continues to expand his knowledge base with new developments and experiences.