Hi, my name is Jon Peroutka. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. I attended Illinois State University immediately after graduating high school and obtained a Bachelor's degree in Business Information Systems in 2009. This degree was a combination of business classes (Finance, Accounting, Marketing, etc) and information technology classes (Java, Visual Basic, html, CSS, COBOL, databases). 

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While attending Illinois State, I was accepted into Discover Financial Services' Business Technology internship program as a Technical Project Manager in their Strategic Project Management team, which led corporate flagship initiatives sponsored by the Marketing business unit. Upon graduating, I returned to this team to begin my career. There, I led highly visible and highly cross-functional initiatives, which involved mainframe systems, internet applications, distributed systems, physical print systems, databases, reporting systems, decisioning strategies, and more. This was a wonderful experience for me to get a birds-eye view across the enterprise. Three of these projects I led won 'Presidents Awards', which are given once per year in a formal company-wide event ceremony to projects and people who delivered outsized value that year. 

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, I used extra time available to get reacquainted with my passion for technology in new ways. I was drawn to the Arduino ecosystem, in search of automating needs around my home. The feeling of building something which is a product of your own mind and delivers value in the form of saving time, complexity, or money is such an intoxicating feeling. This drove me to dive into new problem domains and new technology ecosystems, primarily utilizing the internet to guide my learning and solutions. I invite you to check out my Projects page to see some of these projects. To this day, I love learning new technology and hacking my way through creating new value for myself - then sharing it with others. ​

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As of 2025, I've been a Technical Program Manager in Discover's Data & Analytics department for four years, leading a wide variety of projects from credit risk innovation to MarTech transformations to now merger integration for Discover's entire Data Ecosystem.