About Us

We love playing in the sandbox of the Linux and Open Source world. From coding to databases to hardware to advanced networking, we get the variety of work we crave. The industry, technologies, best practices, and hot topics are constantly evolving which keeps us on our toes and forces us to embrace challenges, be open to change, and continuously innovate.

We love working with software development teams, IT Managers, CTOs, SaaS vendors teams. Especially those who really just want to focus on their own clients and website functionality, and partner with us for infrastructure work, migrations, and ensuring their website or network can safely scale without falling apart.

Our mission is to provide excellence to our clients and team members, delivering above everyone’s expectation. Our vision is to be a role model to our team, vendors, peers, and of course you as a client. For our SaaS software development clients, excellence means an efficient and enjoyable development cycle.

Here are some reasons to work with us:

1. Your developers want to focus on coding. Your team wants to focus on achieving milestones, cranking out features, and fixing bugs. We come alongside them taking care of infrastructure, server administration, proactive maintenance, scalability, and disaster recovery.

2. You don’t want your team to spend months/years learning Linux and DevOps. We have infrastructure automation toolkits ready to go for PHP, Python, and Java web technology stacks. Over the last couple of years, we have been building out our toolkits (which we call “Iceberg”) that contain SaltStack and Kubernetes automation, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and other documentation to handle regular DevOps and SRE requirements. It also provides much-needed standardization between servers and our clients so that anyone in our team can support you in a consistent manner. Iceberg is a great place for the Crafty Penguins to live.

3. You need an experienced team of engineers. Our senior engineers individually have 20+ years of experience. We have breadth and depth in many areas, with both legacy and modern Linux and Open Source technologies. Chances are high that we’ve seen it before. Our wisdom gained from years of being bitten by technology will save you time by either thinking ahead to prevent potential issues, and quickly solving anything that does occur. When you hit a wall, we are here to help via Slack, Zoom, email, or phone.

What makes us unique

1. We’ve been working with Linux since early 1994 in all sorts of situations and flavours and use cases.
2. We are a Windows IT Service provider as well – see www.kerkhofftech.ca which is our parent company. We believe in using the right tool for the job, whether it’s a Microsoft or Open Source solution. This means we are well positioned to help with migrations (in either direction) and integration.
3. We are also software developers. As an example of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that we are selling today, see Kanban for ConnectWise Manage.
4. We strongly believe in continuous improvement, leveraging Lean, Agile, and Kanban concepts. This has driven our CW Kanban SaaS solution, as well as implementing DevOps best practices for our software development clients so that they can continuously deliver code updates to their clients.
5. We think outside the box, and do not restrict ourselves to what some certification told us to do, or a single vendor. What is best for your business?

Fun facts about the Crafty Penguins

• Richard’s first internet experience was in the early, early BBS days, using 300 baud acoustic coupler modem. Today we often work on 10 Gbps connections.
• First computers that some of our team members have worked on include Commodore VIC20s, Tandy TRS-80 Model III, and Osborne 1, at very young ages of course
• We’ve been through the .com (aka .BOMB) era
• We have more beards then non-beards in our team.
• We’ve written everything from assembler code to high-level languages.
• Our team members hail from 5 different countries
• We have active clients in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK.
• We are polyglots, which means that we are able to write software languages, including Assembler, C/C++, BASH, Perl, PHP, Python, Java, C#, VB, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and more.
• We’ve done hostile takeovers of corporate networks, due to management firing existing IT Managers who wouldn’t release passwords or any documentation. Fun times…

Our story

• Our founder (Wim) got his first technology job as a Linux software and network engineer for a local tech startup in Chilliwack, at the age of 18.
• The .com did the .bomb thing, so he spent about 18 months doing Windows (VB/Access/MSSQL) dev work, followed by a couple years of Cisco/Wireless/Linux network management.
• In early 2007, right after Wim got married, the timing was right to launch a new company so Kerkhoff Technologies Inc was started as a one-man-band. Within a year the first employee was hired and we continued to grow from there. The early days consisted of a mix of IT support, ISP support (dialup/ADSL/email), some software development, and the more senior Linux/Cisco engineering work.
• In 2010, we started the transition to Managed Services with monthly agreements and a bigger emphasis on being proactive.
• In 2012, we successfully spun off our SDWAN Bonded Internet SaaS division as a free-standing company.
• In 2016, realized that the Linux/DevOps world is very distinct from the SMB IT support world, so we launched Crafty Penguins as a brand.
• In 2017, we ramped up development of Project Iceberg, which is a new platform for the penguins to stand on: a DevOps automation stack to help onboard and manage our Linux clients.
• In 2018, we decided to focus more and more on supporting software development teams with their SRE and DevOps needs.
• In 2018, we moved into our new office.

Core values

Core values are very important to us, as they are at the heart of what we do, our vision, and mission.