Published: Feb 16, 2019 by Isaac Johnson

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.

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) and while with Medtronic in the Medtronic Cardiac Rhythm and Heart Failure (CRHF) Division I worked on cloud centric updates to Carelink and the underling DevOps systems.  Recently, I joined C.H. Robinson in a more general DevOps and DevOps Architecting role with an amazing team both local and Europe and UK.

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 AzD over Jenkins or why I still use VI and Atom, eschewing VS*** and Emacs.

*Cray came from CDC and still exists (sorta, RIP.. HPE).  Another fun detail I noticed a few Christmas ago is the that the whole top floor of Nakatomi Tower in Die Hard is loaded with CDC Cybers.

**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.

*** VS Code is quite nice. It is my primary editor now.  The Markdown preview makes it gold to me.