Intro
My name is Jonathon and I'm a Software Engineer/Technical Lead from Madison, Wisconsin. I enjoy a diverse array of hobbies including lockpicking, woodworking, guitar playing, electronics, kombucha brewing, knitting, and drone piloting, to name a few.
I absolutely adore the city of Madison. I love to hike, bike, and canoe around the city and its lakes. As is any good Viking, I'm a lover of craft beers and meads (which are never in short supply around here), and find they go billiantly with a round of darts or a game of pool in the friendly neighborhood tavern. Madison has a rich music scene, which I try to soak up as often as I can.
In the Summer, you'll catch me playing volleyball, cornhole, going golfing, and grilling whenever I get the chance. Come Fall and into Winter, I don't miss a game that the UW Madison Badger football team plays. And before Spring comes again, I try to get in a little snowshoeing and ice skating.
In woodworking, software, and life, I'm a big believer in using the right tool for the job. This includes not being afraid to build my own tools, jigs, and templates, when the need arises.
I'm a fast learner and able to figure out how to work with new things, even with little documentation or guidance, which makes me great at blazing new paths and helping pave the way for others to follow. Professionally, this means I'm good at jumping into unfamiliar legacy systems, experimenting with and implementing new technologies, and integrating old and new sytems together. Personally, it means I enjoy jumping in and learning new skills whenever I can, which means I work on an extremely wide array of personal projects.
Work
What I'm Doing Now
As a technical architect, my goal is to ensure the smooth delivery of a reliable product, which means establishing a strong SDLC built on an automated CI/CD platform that allows for rapid and frequent deliveries of code to testing environments (often multiple times per day). We use testing and automated build processes to be confident that when we review and merge code, we maintain a stream of stable deliveries. Deployments are automated so that non-technical stakeholders such as testers and product owners can update their environments with the latest updates when they want, without developer interaction.
I design components, their composition/orchestration, data structures, and interfaces, while guiding and mentoring developers to implement end-user stories. I automate developer tasks such as API client code generation and database model generation to ensure such tasks are as push-button as possible.
I often consult on topics such as UI design, security, and DevOps to optimize for delivery time, simplicity, cost, and testability. I have a great breadth of experience with various technologies and platforms that has left me with a good intuition for patterns that work and patterns that don't, as well as being aware of tools to solve many of the problems that most projects come up against.
What I Like to Do
I particularly enjoy putting SaaS products (both new and legacy) onto the rails of a good SLDC train, modernizing or architecting them to be able to meet the needs of their users. I love being able to build and design Line-Of-Business products and software that can accelerate the work that organizations do by automating the processes that machines do best and allowing the humans to focus on the things they do best.
These users include software developers. I also enjoy building tooling and scripts to make developers lives easier, using things like code generation, plugins for Docker, VSCode, etc, and tools such as Vault to keep developers productive and not worrying about boilerplate or connective code between components.
My Tenets of Software Development
A properly designed and implemented SDLC takes most of the luck, instability, and tedium out of the software development process. It stays out of the way of the team (developers, QA'ers, etc), and allows each part of the organization to focus on what they do best.
Minimize Bus Factor
- A well designed and maintained project should documented and architected in such a way that the absence of any individual will not derail the entire project.
- Architects should be focusing on designing and building frameworks and systems that require little maintanance on their part. In other words, we should always be seeking to "put ourselves out of a job", so that we can focus on building bigger, better, and faster: not merely keeping the existing stuff running.
All Builds and Deploys Should Be Automated
- This pays for itself in time savings over and over again.
- When all infrastructure and code is version controlled and deployments are automated, you have high confidence that anything that works in lower environments (such as dev and test environments) will work in production.
Documentation Is King
- Documentation is a living, breathing, and critical part of the app. This includes both informal inline code comments and formal structured documents. Don't be afraid to keep an informal FAQ with questions that get asked about the project, since they'll probably be asked more than once.
- Version and store documentation that could change when the code changes with the code. Documentation that changes independently of code changes (such as environment names, etc) should not be stored with the code.
- You + 2 weeks ≠ You. Documentation will help even when it's only one person working on the project. Trust me, you'll thank yourself.
- A project should contain all the instructions needed such that a person getting access to the repository knows exactly what to do to build and run the project.
- If a feature isn't documented, it doesn't exist.
Architect for Security
- Whenever possible, architect around security vulnerabilities. Avoid the iceberg field entirely, if possible, rather than trying to rely on patching holes in a sinking ship.
- Make the developer have to go out of their way to introduce vulnerabilities whenever possible. For instance, if you use React to avoid most XSS vulnerabilities (unless someone uses __dangerouslySetHTML()), API tokens instead of cookies to avoid CSRF vulnerabilities, and libraries like NPoco (which makes parameterized SQL queries extremely easy to use) to avoid SQL injection, you can prevent many of the most common sources of security vulnerabilities dead in their tracks.
- Using containers with strong secrets management (such as Vault) and least privaleges based network security, even on developer machines, means that when breaches do occur (such as through poisoned NPM or Nuget packages), they stay isolated and have either limited or no access to anything of value (data, passwords, etc). Using rotating credentials mitigates the viability of leaked secrets to a small time window, and configuring your network to only allow communication along expected, whitelisted channels (most running containers don't need complete internet access) means that compromised components and code usually can't communicate to external servers.
Telemetry and Logging Are First Class Citizens
- Proper telemetry and logging is not terribly difficult to accomplish, and aggregating structured logs in systems like Elasticsearch/Kibana makes the identification and resolution of issues in environments in the cloud astronomically easier.
- Administrators should be able to review and alert off of logs easily. Developers should update logging based on feedback from those reviewing the logs to ensure that noise is minimal and information is easy to extract.
Mad City Viking
Mad City Viking is a brand, initiative, and platform to share the things I've learned and give back to the community and knowledge base of the internet. Although still in the early stages of development, it is a platform for me to produce and procure/curate articles and videos on the following topics:
- MCV-U: Mathematics, Science, and the History Thereof
- MCV Forge: Making and Craftsmanship
- Woodworking and Construction
- Metal Working
- Computer Aided Manufacturing (CNC, 3D Printing, Laser Cutting, etc)
- Book Binding
- eMCV: Software and Electrical Engineering
- MCV Musings: Miscellaneous Interesting Bits of Information
Many of these intertwine and will intersect each other. When I have the content in a more mature state, I will post links here.
This is a cross platform initiative, combining Twitter, Instagram, blogging, and YouTube videos to provide and entertaining and accurate source of information on the aforementioned topics.
Contact
