About Us

A team of IT experts in Canada working with Linux since 1994. Focused on details, patient and friendly. Zero fragile egos. Lots of facial hair.
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Crafty Penguins is a growing team of 13 Linux experts, some of whom have decades of experience with Linux technologies. We are a Linux division of an IT consulting firm Kerkhoff Technologies, which also has a Microsoft Windows division.

Although Kerkhoff Technologies and Crafty Penguins are two separate teams with different skill sets, we’re one company. We all use the same ticket system, Slack and Wiki, sit at the same physical office and have the same leadership team.

This comes quite handy when our clients need us to support both Linux and Windows systems or if our Windows team needs a hand with API integration, troubleshooting SQL or hardware issues.

How we work

We bring to the table in-depth expertise, effective communication, detailed documentation and smooth project management. But if you’ve ever had an IT consultant rolling their eyes at you or asking you “if you tried switching it off and on” as if you were a five-year-old, you know that expertise alone isn’t enough.

We earn your trust

We consider ourselves a part of your team and care about your project as much as you do. We listen to you carefully, ask questions, follow through with our promises and keep our work transparent to help you navigate technology even if you may not fully understand how it works.

We lean into challenges

We aren’t afraid of bruising our egos, and we’ll admit that it’s a difficult task or an unknown component if we encounter one. We are happy to learn, seek other perspectives, and lean on experience and knowledge of others to help you run your business more efficiently.

We look at the bigger picture

We are your competent partner who not just puts out occasional fires but who is familiar with your IT landscape and sees the bigger picture. To provide you with solutions that last and scale, we consider internal relationships, context, market, industry and impact on other systems.

We constantly improve

We always try to be better today than yesterday. For example, we make incremental improvements to your documentation and automatic monitoring systems or remove redundant items that don’t help you. And we share new knowledge and experience within our team to help every member grow.

Meet Our Team

Wim’s first experience with Linux dates back to high school, where he learned how to install, upgrade and fix Debian Linux while spending hours to get the Windows-only dial-up modem to work.

Fast-forward through a university Bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems, several IT jobs in software development, Linux-based network security and database administration, Wim founded his own company Kerkhoff Technologies.

Once his client base grew, he decided to create a Linux-focused division Crafty Penguins. He also developed a training program for Linux engineers, knowing that no university or industry certification would provide his new team members with the unique skills they needed to support their clients.

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Our goal is to unlock potential for our clients

We unlock your business potential by removing roadblocks in the way of the flow of your work, and increasing reliability and performance of your systems so that you can serve your own clients better and scale your business without worrying about your IT.

Wim Kerkhoff

Founder and CEO

Team Members

Richard Clark

VP – Engineering

Richard has 35 years of experience with systems administration and software engineering in the Linux ecosystem. He specializes in DevOps, automation, training and clean-up of technical debt.

Chris Pickett

VP – Crafty Penguins

Chris has 25 years of experience with Linux and DevOps. He specializes in building microservice container infrastructures, bare metal to cloud computing migrations, and custom tool development.

Rob Hartzenberg

Sr. Linux Systems Engineer

Rob has 25 years of experience in software and network engineering. He specializes in building and managing networks of any scale: from microcontrollers to large and complex networks of internet service providers.

Curtis Hildebrand

Linux Systems Engineer

Curtis has 20 years of experience deploying and securing Linux systems and 6 years of experience in DevOps engineering. He specializes in system audits for security, stabilization, and migration of infrastructure due to system growth.

Nicole Mcfarlane

Sr. Linux Systems Engineer

Nicole has 10 years of experience with Linux, software engineering, and DevOps. She specializes in monitoring, metrics, and alerting, as well as our proprietary security automation systems of Crafty Penguins we use for all our clients.

Joshua Smith

VP – Operations

Joshua has 16 years experience in Network Administration and Security, Server Management and Client Relations across a broad range of industries and technologies. He specializes in Operations because of his ability to take a ‘big picture’ view in order to provide the best solutions for long-term success.

Kevin Chee

Linux Systems Engineer

Kevin has 3 years of IT experience in a variety of subjects from BCIT, including development, devops, network and system administration with an interest in automation and security. Kevin was an on-campus interviewee and since joining the team, has been making some great contributions whilst improving his skillset.

Nishan Vivekanandan

Linux Systems Engineer

Nishan has 4 years of Linux and DevOps experience in Cloud Operations support as well as retail software development. He has a keen interest in all things DevOps. His astute sense of reasoning helps him get to the core of an issue and resolve it quickly.

Linux Engineer

Do you see yourself here?

Apply to one of our open positions!

Download team member profiles

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Wondering if our team members have the required skill set and experience?

Download a PDF with detailed profiles of our core team members: our technical lead, Linux system engineers and automation and network specialists.