Jonathon Sim - A Biography

Jono has a huge desire to learn and is consistently looking for operational improvements to his team and the various other departments within Zeald.com

Jonathon’s programming career began at the age of 12 when he began writing games in BASIC for his Commodore Vic 20. Originally from a farm in the back blocks of Coroglen on the Coromandel Peninsula, Jonathon completed his college schooling to bursary level (7th Form) and then moved to Auckland to study the ‘sciences’ at the University of Auckland.

Jonathon completed a Bachelor of Science majoring in physics and then a Masters of Science majoring in applied mathematics. For his masters he wrote a 30,000 word thesis entitled ‘Saddle-Node-Hopf Bifurcations in a Biological System’ demonstrating once and for all that Jono is a unique and seriously ‘out-there’ individual!

The culmination of 5 years of hard study taught Jono many things but the biggest discovery for Jono was that he loved working with computers and didn’t want to work in the academic world! Following on from that hard-won inner discovery, Jono subsequently applied for a position as a programmer in the very early days of Zeald.com. Jono was successful in his application and became one of Zeald.com’s first employees and promptly started moving up the ranks as the company started to grow.

Jonathon is now the Development Director at Zeald.com and manages Zeald.com’s team of programmers. He has been directly responsible for the development and implementation of many of Zeald.com’s internal operational systems and workflows. He also has substantial computer networking and systems administration skills and has designed much of the technical infrastructure that runs Zeald.com. Jono has a huge desire to learn and is consistently looking for operational improvements to his team and the various other departments within Zeald.com. He is a passionate advocate of open source software and has personally contributed to many projects including Interchange, KDE, Perl and many others.

Jono lives just north of Auckland at Red Beach, on the Whangaparaoa Peninsula with an extremely grumpy cat he inherited called Tuddy. Jono has traveled in South America and has a lifetime goal to one day sail up the Amazon River (along with his other goal to – ‘get extremely rich or die trying’). He loves to cook and fancies himself as an extremely versatile chief that can cook a huge range of dishes from all over the world … although he often has a hard time convincing many Zeald.com staff (with the exception of Brent who will eat anything) to partake of his illustrious creations!