November Member of the Month: Johnathan Browall Nordström

November represents a month of gratitude and there is one member who deserves an Indeni Crowd shout out. After completing countless challenges and tirelessly contributing to Check Point related discussions, we are happy to name Johnathan Browall Nordström as November Member of the Month.

Johnathan’s approach to network engineering aligns perfectly with Indeni’s mission. Armed with an objective of avoiding unpredictable issues while working with mission-critical equipment, Johnathan stumbled upon Indeni years ago:

After a long day at the office performing repetitive tasks, such as checking if the ARP table had reached its limits on a few firewall, it got me thinking. There has to be some automated software that could do this. I started googling around and found Indeni, which did exactly what I wanted. I did a POC and the following year purchased a few licenses.

Johnathan was so supportive of this proactive approach to Network Operations that he became one of the first individuals build checks for the CheckPoint firewalls from his home-lab in Stockholm, Sweden. In other words, Johnathan was an IKE (Indeni Knowledge Consultant) before IKEs existed. Writing scripts for Indeni opened up the opportunity to “create something that gives value to a lot of administrators just like me and to be able to do it from home and when it works for myself is a big bonus.” With the development of the Indeni Crowd, Johnathan has been enjoying the real world input that helps drive product knowledge development:

I generally love questions that question how we do things; as I always like to learn new ways of solving problems. Also, reports of bugs are something I weirdly like. It means that there was a corner case I didn’t think of and that my script now can improve.

Want to see Johnathan’s work? View his CheckPoint Alerts here and share your feedback in the Indeni Crowd CheckPoint Discussions. Don’t forget to add him to your professional network via Linkedin!

Fun Facts about Johnathan:

Do you have a collection of anything?

A long time ago I collected pins, but right now I don’t collect anything.

Best and worst quality?

The best quality is that I am organized, positive, and always wanting to learn new things
The worst quality is that I am stubborn and bad at doing repetitive tasks.

A song that always makes you happy when you hear it?

Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here

Proudest moment as a network engineer?

Migrating the central production firewall, which was an old Cisco ASA, to a brand new Check Point gateway with very little issues.

If you could master one new skill, what would it be?

I would love to be really good at cooking. Right now it is too abstract for me to attempt more than simple dishes. However, if I was single I would probably only drink Soylent or some other liquid diet for simplicity.

Your first code ever… what was the first thing you created?

I and some friends created a text-based adventure game in Java where the player explored a cave and fought monsters. The most dreadful monster you could encounter was a “(null)” which was due to some bug and was not possible to kill. You had to hit “w” to go forward in the cave, but to prevent someone from hitting the key over and over again that key changed to “perform suicide” once you encountered a monster, so you had to be careful! It also featured us recording a intro with voice acting and special sound effects.

What advice would you give to someone who is coming from IT to start code?

Speaking for myself, the most important thing is to have something you want to do or solve in code and try start working on it as soon as possible. Once you have that goal you can try to reach it, solving issues along the way.

For me, it doesn’t work to study strange coding examples that are not applicable to situations I encounter.

What IT Heroes

My current colleague, Patrik Jonsson (also a previous member of the month), has inspired me through our 6 years working together.

His hawk-eyes do not miss a single misplaced space in code review; he also emphasizes the importance of good comments and documentation.