Isaac is a Cloud Solutions Architect and DevOps/SRE Architect who focuses on cloud migrations and devops+SRE processes.
He also is a dad to three wonderful daughters (hence the references to Princess King sprinkled throughout the blog).
Greetings and Salutations on this Fine and Glorious Day!
This is my normal greeting most mornings. As an early riser, I am often the first one on deck at work and so this ridiculous greeting (often at an elevated volume) sets the tone for those coming in. And whether the day is indeed glorious or fine, it’s moot when those around you boot their laptops with a smile.
My background is Midwest. Some in Michigan, some in Minnesota. After we got married, we spent nearly 9 years on the west coast in San Diego. As the picture shows we have three wonderful (energetic and loud) daughters and thus moved back home to Minnesota where housing is a tad cheaper than San Diego and Poway.
Professional
My professional background is SCM; Software Configuration Management. I cut my teeth on Fortran at Control Data (ICEM) just before it finally ceased to be. It was formative to see a once giant in decline - It made me realize how important it is to be honest and avoid duplicitous behavior - as many can attest, CDC was a top dog* along with IBM and Wang. It was almost entirely through mis-management it shrank to nothingness.
Shortly after a couple internships, I got into SCM as the “build dude”. This meant writing scripts (often in perl) and handling compiles of large java projects. I continued to grow expertise in various Revision Control Systems** including Subversion, Perforce and ClearCase.
By the time I had about 10 years under my belt, I started to do more management. I’ll be the first to admit, my first shot at it I sucked. When i started, i had a big ego and over the years I’ve grown and adopted a philosophy best demonstrated by Jon G and Dan W of Servant Leadership.
Feeding Monkeys in Central India around 2007/2008
In about ‘07 SCRUM became a thing and soon everyone was hip to “agile”. I’ve been certified in IC Agile and Dojo style Agile and find it is a great way to run a team that services a larger organization. I think teams that produce sellable output are better served by a mix, but we can set that aside for another topic.
With Ahead I had a focus on Azure and Azure DevOps (VSTS) while contracting with Medtronic which turned into a full time role with the Medtronic Cardiac Rhythm and Heart Failure CRHF Division.
After, what we shall call, a glorified six month mistake, I joined Wellsky where I help out in various ways (Management and Architecture) in the Home Health and Hospice divisions. I try not to get too much into work on my blog, but the senior management at Wellsky is greatly supportive of growth, blogging and conferences, and encourages intellectual and technological growth and improvement.
Recently, as Wellsky has focused on bringing development more centralized to KS, I’ve joined Abbott (formerly St. Jude Medical) in their Structured Heart Devision as a Cloud Architect. Specifically in the area focused around TAVI/TAVR (Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation/Replacement).
Contact
If you wish to email me, you can email isaac.johnson@gmail.com . I will gladly discuss why NodeJS is better than Python, the virtues of AzDO over Jenkins or why I still use VI and VisualCode, eschewing Eclipse and Emacs.
Recently, I realized I still had the note about NodeJS here and to be honest, since 2020 my feelings on that have changed. I now find NodeJS has gotten a bit too fluid and I spent far too much time dancing between versions with nvm whereas Python3 is really rock solid. Most of my new work is now entirely in Python using the FastAPI framework.
Notes
*Cray came from CDC and still exists. Another fun detail I noticed this past Christmas is the that the whole top floor of Nakatomi Tower in Die Hard is loaded with CDC Cybers.
I ran into a retired senior manager from CDC at one of our Control Data reunion picnics. He told me that the shoot that night needed a room of computers. However, the original company (?IBM) backed out. We (CDC) was doing a trade show in Los Angeles and had the machines on a truck. They agreed to loan them to the movie studio for a shoot as they werent due to be shipped back out right away.
**some today use “SCM” for that - but it’s such an overloaded acronym, i much prefer revision control over source control management. Besides the overloaded TLA (three letter acronym), people store far more than ‘source code’ in revision control systems so RCS is really a much better term.